Breaking Big Read news! The Kansas City Public Library has come into possession of historic fictitious documents outlining the life of Tom Sawyer after his youthful adventures in the works of Mark Twain.

They come to KC Unbound by way of alert patron Tom Ryan, who has composed the following to shed light on one of Missouri’s greatest literary mysteries.

Be sure to keep track of the Library's special Big Read programming, including signature events and book discussions, at kcbigread.org.

The Truth About the Infamous Major Tom Sawyer as Told by a Military Academy Classmate by way of Marshal Bass Reeves and Injun Bill

“Judge Thatcher hoped to see Tom a great lawyer or a great soldier some day. He said he meant to look to it that Tom should be admitted to the National military academy and afterwards trained in the best law school in the country, in order that he might be ready for either career or both.” – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. XXXV

For a brief shining moment in the spring of 1969, I was Aunt Polly. The 8th grade class of St. Peter’s enacted a little play based on some scenes from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We all got to choose parts, and I petitioned long and hard (it seemed so, for there was heavy resistance) for the part of Aunt Polly.

Who in their right mind would want to be Aunt Polly, you might ask, and me a boy as well?

But I looked on it as a challenge – could I, a 12 year old boy, bring off this crotchety old maid? I felt I was up to the challenge. Besides, I had the outfit already. On the Halloween prior, I decided that I wasn’t going to get dressed up in any of the more typical outfits – superheroes, skeletons, ghosts, the characters in the YMCA song – no, I was going to paint Dorchester, MA, red as an old woman.

And so, when it was announced that we were going to perform some scenes based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I figured, “I got the outfit, I’m gonna play the part of Aunt Polly.” As it turned out, I had no such aunt, and my mother had nothing about Aunt Polly about her, but Sr. Joseph Helen, our 8th grade teacher, known to all the students as “Jake” had a lot of Aunt Polly about her, and so I modeled myself on “Jake” and tried to channel Aunt Polly, with a little Jonathan Winters’ Maude Frickert thrown in.

One of my favorite quotes is: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That statement from Faulkner’s 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, could be said of all of Faulkner’s writing, and for Absalom, Absalom! (1936) especially.

Having lived in the midwest for more than 10 years, I haven’t given much thought to our country’s borders or the people who reside near them. DiAnn Mills’ new suspense fiction, Sworn to Protect, gives an interesting look into the southernmost areas of the U.S. and the profession that works to keep the borders safe.

Set in McAllen, Texas, this page-turner opens with a dangerous operation that takes place near the Rio Grande, a river that serves as the Mexico-United States border. While on duty preventing illegal human and drug trafficking, U.S. Border Patrol agent Danika Morales recalls a dreadful event that happened two years ago: her husband, Toby, was murdered, and his body was left beside an obscure road. The crime went unresolved.

The unseen offender is now stalking her, aiming to end her life and destroy her family. As a single mother, Danika is concerned about her deaf little girl, Tiana, and Tiana’s nanny and family’s housekeeper, Sandra Rodriguez.

I confess, I picked up Portia de Rossi’s memoir, Unbearable Lightness, for the title. The blurbs on the back were by some of my favorite authors, a plus. A quick scan of the inside jacket was enough to convince me to give it a try (I don’t like to read the whole blurb because I don’t want to know the ending).

I’m not big into television or celebrity goings-on, so it wasn’t until the last 50 pages of the book that I realized (don’t laugh), that’s where I know Portia from!

Which, for me, made the book that much better.

Portia tells her story in meticulous detail, without any judgment or self-pity. With gut-wrenching honesty, she is able to say: This is who I was. This is who I am. These are the things that make me, me. I am defined only by myself.

Her approach to her life is bold and fierce, but in writing about it, she is gentle. She writes simply and honestly about the people, things and experiences that make her who she is. Her journey is about gaining the ability and the strength to face her vulnerabilities.

Free-speech advocate, Hustler magazine magnate, and campaigner against political hypocrisy, Larry Flynt teams up with Columbia University professor David Eisenbach, Ph.D. in One Nation Under Sex, to shed light on how the private lives of America’s political leaders have shaped American history.

It’s said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Flynt and Eisenbach’s substantial, well-researched tome on the history of sex and sexuality in American politics proves that point early on with the case of founding father Alexander Hamilton.

The Secretary of the Treasury’s affair with Maria Reynolds quickly became complicated when her husband James Reynolds asked for a well-paid government job. After James learned of the affair with his wife, Hamilton found himself regularly paying “loans” to the couple and keeping up an affair that had long since fizzled to avoid being exposed.

Dust off your spurs, slap on your chaps and saddle up your favorite reading chair to enjoy Patrick deWitt’s gritty and darkly amusing new western, The Sisters Brothers.

Set in 1851 in Oregon and California, The Sisters Brothers tells the dusty, violent tale of Eli and Charlie Sisters, sibling henchmen for a mysterious and wealthy man known only as The Commodore. Their mission is to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, a strange little man who possesses a mysterious formula wanted by The Commodore, and who was last seen behaving bizarrely on his gold claim outside of Sacramento.  

From Oregon City, Eli and Charlie set out on an unexpectedly life-altering journey across the western frontier to find and dispose of Warm. Along the way, the outlaw brothers instigate shootouts, prowl saloons, meet unique characters, and put themselves in settings and situations common in traditional western stories.