Correct times for remaining October book signings

DDR Books will host two events in the remainder of October. On Saturday, Oct. 26, Phyllis Cole-Dai will be in the store from 2 to 4 pm to present on and sign her new book, “Beneath the Same Stars,” available for $14.95. The second event is Tuesday, Oct. 29 at 7 to 9 pm, and Barbara Scoblic will be at the store signing her new memoir, “Lost Without the River,” available for $16.45.

“Beneath the Same Stars” is a novel “inspired by actual events surrounding the US-Dakota War. August 18, 1862: On the Sioux reservation in southwestern Minnesota, Indians desperate for food and freedom rise up against whites in the region. Sarah Wakefield, the wife of a physician, is taken captive with her two babies. Their fate falls into the hands of the warrior Caske, with whom she has slim acquaintance. As war rages, little does she know how entwined their lives will become.”

DDR Books has in stock two of her previous works. First, “The Emptiness of Our Hands: 47 Days on the Streets” ($14.95), a meditative chronicle of her and photographer James Murray’s experience of living “by choice on the streets of Colombus, Ohio…. They went to the streets to practice presence: to offer nonjudgmental attention and compassion to everyone they met, especially the chronically homeless, who are so often ignored, scorned, abused, or shunned.”

DDR Books also has her anthology of mindfulness poems, “Poetry of Presence” ($21.95), a collection of more than 150 mindfulness poems, mostly by contemporary or recent poets, both acclaimed or lesser known. These poems call us to the Here and Now, and help us to dwell there.”

The second event is October 29 at 7 to 9 pm, Barbara Scoblic will be at the store signing her new memoir, “Lost Without the River.” The youngest of seven, Barbara Scoblic wrestles against the expectations of her parents, the strictures of the church, and the limits of a time dominated by men as she grows up in a family struggling against Depression-era hardship and personal tragedy to carve out a small farm in rural South Dakota. Eager for adventure, she leaves–first for the Peace Corps and ultimately for the alien geography of Manhattan’s Upper East Side–but she never truly escapes. An elegantly wrought memoir of resilience, courage, and reinvention–and a portrait of nature at its most beautiful and demanding–”Lost Without the River” demonstrates the emotional power that even the smallest place can exert, and the gravitational pull that calls a person back home.