MSI Press Blog

  Sharon Cole's book, Hazel and Olaf reached #4 among hot new releases in the category of Great Depression and #24 in depression history (Amazon general category). Book Description: They sold the farm, packed up seven children, and chased a promise called California. Based on Hazel’s journal, this true story follows a family that leaves Wisconsin hoping for relief from brutal winters—only to run out of money with hundreds of miles still to go. Stranded and desperate, they enter a world of labor camps, endless fieldwork, hunger, and exhaustion, where families are worked hard, paid little, and treated as disposable. Once respected and secure, they find themselves suddenly labeled vagrants. Pride becomes a liability. Dignity must be defended daily. And survival depends on grit, faith, and refusing to give up—especially for Hazel, who will not allow poverty to erase who she is or break her family apart. This is a raw, gripping true story of endurance, injustice, and a woman who stood ...

  California has always shimmered at the edge of imagination—a place that seems less like geography and more like myth. From the moment it appeared on early maps as a rumored island, it carried an aura of promise, a whisper of something just beyond reach. Even now, when the highways are crowded and the coastlines mapped down to the last tidepool, that dreamlike quality persists. California still feels like a threshold. The Myth Before the Map Long before it was a state, California was a story. Spanish explorers borrowed the name from a 16th‑century romance novel, Las Sergas de Esplandián , which described a paradise ruled by Queen Calafia, rich in gold and guarded by griffins. The fiction came first; the territory followed. That origin matters. California entered history already wrapped in fantasy—a place imagined before it was found. The Edge of the World Geographically, California sits at the western rim of the continent, where land gives way to ocean and the horizon feels infini...