Announcing a Change to e-TextBlock
|
|
What was called the "shorter version of our bi-monthly newsletter", e-TextBlock will now feature the same content as our print version with full staff reviews, upcoming events, and store announcements. It is shorter no more! We celebrate the ease of access that digital media provides, and hope you do, too. Thank you for subscribing.
|
|
Review of
America: The Farewell Tour by Tony Weller
Best Weller Pick for September-October:
The Tangled Tree, David Quammen
Staff Reviews:
Eager,
Like a Mother,
Severance, and more
Store announcements: Banned Books Week, Lovecraft Halloween blog
Upcoming Events: Utah Humanities Book Festival, Books & Bridges, and more
Rare Book Acquisitions
|
|
America: The Farewell Tour
Chris Hedges
Simon & Schuster
9781501152672
Hardcover / $27.00
Reviewed by Tony Weller
America: The Farewell Tour is a scathing indictment and a call to action.
Chris Hedges’ recently published book will not make you happy, but it is an urgently timely and impressively smart book. Hedges’ writing made me cry, but not as often as it angered me about the failures of our culture. As troubling as Hedges’ book is, it’s important we read it because our nation is facing dire problems that we cannot repair without understanding. According to Hedges, most causes are deeply embedded in the systems of our culture. So grit your teeth for his sobering exposé about what these United States have become.
Hedges’ assessment of the sickness of our times is searing in its directness. He is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, author, and activist and educated enough in the fields of sociology, anthropology, religion, and economics to dissect our present socio-political zeitgeist. His rage is palpable in his scolding of the system we take for granted, one we preserve at our own peril. With excerpts from Karl Marx, James Baldwin, Rebecca Solnit, and others, Hedges diagnoses the pathology of our culture.
America: The Farewell Tour occurs in seven chapters: “Decay,” “Heroin,” “Work,” “Sadism,” “Hate,” “Gambling,” and “Freedom.” Each provides analysis of failing systems alongside tragic stories of those affected.
In the first chapter, “Decay,” we read about the structural reasons for collapses of prominent cultures in eras before ours. Hedges examines the progress of societal systems to show how strong cultures fail, often because encultured assumptions prove unsustainable. “Decay” hits hard as we learn about extractive corporate economies that destroy jobs, lives and communities. He ascribes contemporary tragedies like shootings, suicides, and opioid addiction to the desperation, loss of purpose, hope and self-esteem that accompanies the realization that our system is rigged for the wealth of privileged oligarchs who have a myopic lust for power and sociopathic disregard for consequences. Hedges doesn’t let gun and drug manufacturers off the hooks for the greed that drives their actions, either.
About multi-generational urban poverty he writes,
“Most will live, suffer, and die within the space of a few squalid city blocks.
No jobs. No hope. No help. They blunt their despair through alcohol and drugs..They never have enough money. They probably never will.”
The personal stories in this book are painful to read. These are bleak topics, but seriously important ones that are too often avoided or glossed over with inadequate, overly-simple ideas that reveal our desire for easy solutions and our attachments to the flawed customs embedded in our culture. Hedges’ stories from the fronts of human despair have saddened me deeply.
In “Hate," one comprehends the militancy with which oligarchs defend power and the dangerous deals they strike with fascists. Hedges earned a Master of Divinity from Harvard and is a Presbyterian Minister. In the book, he expresses shame for the Christians who have abandoned Christian principles in support of apocalyptic fairy tales and tribal fear of diversity.
After introducing and characterizing our nation's present regressive influences, Hedges groups the KKK, White Supremacists, and Christian Fascists together for the rest of the book.
America: The Farewell Tour deepened my understanding of the complexities of our plight. Hedges' comprehension of the causes of our societal strife make it clear how hard it will be to alter course. As much as I dislike it, this comes as small surprise to me: history shows that culture changes no faster than generations turn. Most adults defend culturally inculcated principles regardless of evidence and reason. It is the source of our comfort, our security, our dullness and our meanness. Change is disrespectful to culture and this is why we can’t step far enough away from our warped mirror to admit to our own roles in the causes of problems that threaten us.
The workings of capitalism are only vaguely understood by most of us, yet its dogmas are defended like religion. It is heresy to do less. Publicly traded corporations are virtually obligated to perform psychopathically. They are machines for consolidation of wealth and exportation of liabilities. Those who perform the least labor reap the largest rewards. Economic legerdemain. The working class is catching on. But watch out. Kleptocrats are fortifying against the poor, the working class, the middle class and the future. Near the end of the book, Hedges presents a hopeful and sane vision of the world we could create if we can become clear-headed enough as a society to move beyond our destructive beliefs. At page 304 is a tight and thorough list of the ideals of a sensible and sustainable culture. After such gloom, the reader needs it.
I can’t resist this condensation: “This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny.. [The struggle will mean] a huge reordering of our world..that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit and universal, single-payer health care. Global warming will become a national and global emergency.. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels.. We will terminate nuclear weapons programs.. We will demilitarize the police.. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers.”
I can’t say I enjoyed reading this book. However, I am awed by the clarity with which Hedges writes. I yearn to live in the society he envisions. One may disagree with his understanding of causes, but few of us are well informed enough to contend his interpretation meaningfully. He is as earnest as he is brilliant.
America: The Farewell Tour is an important book. Read it. Let it influence your actions.
|
|
Best Weller's Pick 20% off September-October:
|
|
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
David Quammen
9781476776620
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover
List Price: $30.00
Our Price: $24.00
Reviewed by Frank Pester
In July of 1837, Charles Darwin labeled a small notebook “B." The B notebook traveled with him for five years over land and sea as he made his way along the coast of South America. On its pages, Darwin noted the diversity of nature he saw. At the bottom of page 21 he wrote, “organized beings represent a tree.” Later, he attempted a feeble sketch. A more substantial sketch followed with a trunk and branches labeled A, B, C, and D, some clustered together and some farther apart. In this way, Darwin developed an idea central to the theory of evolution.
Since the publication of
On the Origin of Species, the theory of evolution has been debated by those who accept its premises and those who, because of their personal beliefs, reject it. The idea that our evolutionary history can be represented by a tree has been passed along unquestioned since 1859, but David Quammen asks: what if the tree of life is not a tree?
Quammen has written an engrossing look at the new discoveries in molecular biology that have changed our understanding of the history of life on earth. He takes complicated subjects, DNA sequencing and horizontal gene transfer, and makes them accessible. In
The Tangled Tree, Quammen offers a guide to the scientists working in a field that is constantly changing and as tangled as the tree in his title.
Starting with the drawing in the margins of Darwin’s notebook, Quammen explores the beginning of the tree of life idea which was later reworked by Edward Hitchcock into two trees representing the plant and animal kingdoms. This model was shattered by developments in molecular biology in the 70s with the finding of new divisions of genera and the horizontal transfer of genes between single-celled organisms.
The central subject of the book is Carl Woese, a complicated man who was fiercely dedicated to his work. At the time, scientists had grouped life forms into two main categories but Woese added a third category for bacteria and eukaryotes, or non-bacteria. Although Woese received many awards for his startling discoveries, he fell short of a Nobel Prize.
Chronicling the primitive and hazardous lab work of scientists such as Woese and his colleagues puts the reader right there with them. Quammen writes,
“Mitch Sogin, a lab assistant of Woese, described the deliveries of radioactive phosphorous (an isotope designated as P-32, with a half-life of fourteen days), which by 1972 amounted to a sizable quantity arriving every other Monday. The P-52 came as liquid within a lead ‘pig’, a shipping container designed to protect the shipper, though not whoever opened it. Sogin would draw out a measured amount of the liquid and add it to whatever bacterial culture he intended to process next. ‘I was growing stuff with P-32. It was crazy.. I don’t know why I’m alive today.’”
The Tangled Tree offers new insights into the theory of evolution through horizontal gene transfer and the naming of other kingdoms of life. It shows the inter-connectedness of life and the growth of scientific ideas, and adds human faces to the findings in the lab. Well-written and engaging,
The Tangled Tree sparks questions of what the future might bring as we struggle to understand the complexity of life.
|
|
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Ben Goldfarb
Chelsea Green Publishing
9781603587396
Hardcover / $24.95
Reviewed by José Knighton
In spite of its cornball title and the lengthy, requisite penance of its subtitle, Ben Goldfarb's natural history of North America's overlooked aquatic mammal matters very much indeed. Anyone with the slightest empathy for other species knows about the successful reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park over twenty years ago. And many are also aware (thanks to YouTube) of how those wolves, culling the overabundant elk herds that stripped stream banks of foliage, caused a trophic cascade that rehabilitated Yellowstone's riparian habitats. But, as Goldfarb points out in his "Wolftopia" chapter, those charismatic wild canids could not have performed this feat of environmental restoration without the complicity of humble beavers.
Readers may be surprised to learn that beavers were exterminated from the region that would eventually include Yellowstone many decades before ranchers and stockmen declared their war of ecocide on wolves. Early in the 19th century, before a boundary between Canada and America's Oregon Territory had been established, The Hudson Bay Company decided to preempt American interest in the region by creating a "fur desert" south of the Columbia. To this end, an affluent resident of Montreal, Peter Skene Ogden, was put in charge of what Goldfarb calls a "furpocalypse." During six expeditions from 1824 to 1830 Ogden's voyageurs and trappers exterminated beavers for the fashion trade throughout the future states of Oregon, California, and inland to Utah's Wasatch Mountains. All that was left behind where beavers once thrived was Ogden's name; there's even an Ogden street in Los Angeles.
Goldfarb borrows the phrase, "Age of Extermination," from fellow author, Frank Graham, to describe the 19th Century's destruction, which included bison, passenger pigeons, grizzly bears and large predators as well as beavers. The "Age of Extermination" was so relentless on California's beavers that lauded zoologist, Joseph Grinnell, who published Fur-Bearing Mammals of California in 1937, considered the beaver a non-native species. His mis-recognition has made reintroduction of beavers to the Golden State problematic to this day. Fortunately, obstacles to re-population by beavers, with or without assistance, on public and private land, have not been insurmountable. Much of Eager reads like a progress report, filled with many positive surprises.
|
|
Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy
Angela Garbes
Harper Wave
9780062662941
Hardcover / $24.99
Reviewed by Lila Ann Weller
Thorough, data-driven, personal, and digestible, Like a Mother is the ultimate pregnancy guide. Containing not only the physiological fundamentals of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum changes, but also an intersectional human-rights and scientific history, this book is one that acknowledges cultural difference, narrative medicine, and the long history of medical "science" being a tool to control the bodies & lives of femme persons and persons of color.
Garbes' writing is genuine and lovably honest on the aspects of pregnancy, birth, and new parenthood that can be difficult to talk about, such as spontaneous abortion (miscarriage), lactation struggles, postpartum sex & intimacy (no spoilers, but she has a story so hilariously, tenderly relatable that you'll be laughing out loud) and doctor/care provider incompatibility, not to mention the sorry state of American birth & maternal care in general. This book is peppered with so many tidbits of science, anthropology, and the aspects of the body's natural technology and possible medical innovations, you won't be able to stop regaling your friends with your newfound knowledge!
|
|
Severance
Ling Ma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
9780374261597
Hardcover / $26.00
Reviewed by Kylee Hill
Apocalypse narratives, wildly popular as they are in every form of media, minister to our fantasies as much as our nightmares (or maybe our fantasies always contain our nightmares, I don’t know, consult our Freud section.) The dystopian part of the premise of Severance, then, is not that the world has ended, but that it could end and you might still have to get up and go to work.
Cloaked in the tropes of a civilization-rending disaster and its aftermath — in this case a virus called Shen Fever that brutally vitiates the minds of its many victims, causing them to forget themselves and perform mindless, soulless repetitions of whatever they used to do most often in their former lives ad infinitum — this novel disrobed is really about work: how foundational, formative, and yet wholly ridiculous is modern work in our lives, with its many displacements and disturbances, violences and small pleasures.
Unusually for such a theme, first-time novelist Ling Ma does not truncate her gaze to one type of worker or one kind of job, fitting a blunt examination of the consumer supply chain stretching from a 32nd floor office in Manhattan to a dangerous factory in Shenzhen, China into a plot that also features its protagonist blogging her way through being the last working person in New York City and a gang of fever survivors lead by an unhinged cult leader living in an abandoned midwestern mall. Ma is adept at conjuring mood and using sublunary details to make it linger like a catchy hook; which is to say this book is not without many small, dark pleasures of its own, including a Salt Lake City cameo, all written in lucid drinkable prose I downed in a single day.
Unusual too is the fact Candace Chen, our 20-something narrator, does not exactly hate her admittedly tedious job, because wish as she might that she was doing something more “interesting” she also needs to be needed, to be useful in some way. Her predicament is reminiscent of a famous line by Fredric Jameson: "It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." As a riff on that general idea this novel is memorable and surprisingly layered, imbuing vivid emotional textures into a satiric limning of the personal, the corporate, and the global economy of which we’re all, inevitably, a part.
|
|
Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower
Christian McKay Heidicker
Simon & Schuster
9781481499132
Hardcover / $18.99
Reviewed by Emma Fox
Phoebe Lane lives in a world where B-movie monsters are real, and only her father – the invisible man in the sky – keeps her and her mother from being annihilated. They know that when Daddy casts his eye nearby, it’s time to pack up and get outta town or risk being eaten by irradiated ants.
But what if Daddy isn’t looking at the attacking hordes to warn them? What if, instead of dutifully watching over his young daughter, the man in the sky has a TV remote in his hand, and the death and destruction of what Phoebe calls a 'Shiver' is his entertainment?
Darkly playful,
Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower is a pastiche of 1950s America, a distress cry on behalf of the girls who have to fend off unwanted advances and misogyny, and a criticism (if lightly delivered) of the culture of violence and destruction we delight in daily from the entertainment industry. This young adult novel is one to indulge in while wearing 3-D glasses, and may even be a compelling argument to try America's post-war tinned ham again.
Meet Christian McKay Heidicker Friday, October 12 at 7 PM for a reading & signing - more details
here.
|
|
Censorship happens in the United States for reasons you might not think. A concerned parent might call the school board with a complaint about their child's assigned reading, and out of fear of reprisal, the board will remove a book from school libraries without seeking community input. This kind of ban happens all the time, and restricts the personal freedoms of the many for the sake of a few. Join Weller Book Works during Banned Books Week to learn more about the ways in which books are banned or challenged, and the impact this has on your freedom to read.
|
|
Beginning 19 September with a new post each Wednesday leading up to Halloween, Red Emma will blog about Lovecraft: his writing, his life, and his odd predilection for Anglicized spellings. If you'd like to follow along at home, each reading will be from the Del Rey compilations from 1996, all of which can be ordered through
wellerbookworks.com
.
|
|
Hey! Did you know?
Now you can buy used books from our website using the
Biblio.com search function in the sidebar. This is good for finding one title, but be careful to use the 'back' button if you want to search for more to make sure you're finding
Weller Book Works' inventory, and not some other store's. Biblio.com is an independently owned and operated service.
|
|
Recurring Events
Breakfast Club with lead new book buyer Catherine Weller is every Tuesday from 10 - 11 AM at Coffee Connection. Join her for book news and casual conversation - no reading requirement!
Lit Knit is a crafting circle held every second and fourth Wednesday of the month from 6 - 8 PM. Crafters of all kinds are welcome to join us for crafting and friendly conversation.
Collectors' Book Salon is held the final Friday of each month from January through October, beginning at 6:30 PM. Light refreshments, a bookish presentation, and smart conversation make this event a Can't-Miss for collectors and bibliophiles.
|
|
Lynell Garfield will read from and sign her uplifting children's book and field guide,
The Secret Life of Streams
. Great for families and small children, this event is sure to be a lively and life-affirming look at the ecology of a stream, as told through the adventures of Loralei the Mayfly.
|
|
Nathan Devir returns for Books & Bridges to discuss the literature of Chaim Potok. Potok, a rabbi and novelist, considered himself a
zwischenmensch
(Yiddish: an "in-between person") with respect to his religious and social identity. Devir asserts that Potok explored this existential malaise in many of his characters. Join us at 6:30 PM for this insightful discussion.
|
|
Author Kathy Kirkpatrick returns to read from her latest book,
American Prisoner of War Camps in Arizona and Nevada
. Providing detail on the care and employment of prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention of 1929, the lives of POWs in these states are illustrated along with the details of camp locations in Arizona and Nevada and the deaths and burials that occurred in them.
|
|
Music & culture journalist Jason Heller, in conversation with audiophile Tony Weller, will discuss his new book,
Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded
. As the 1960s drew to a close and mankind trained its telescopes on other worlds, old conventions gave way to a new kind of hedonistic freedom that celebrated sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Derided as nerdy or dismissed as fluff, the science fiction genre rarely gets credit for its catalyzing effect on this revolution. In
Strange Stars
, Jason Heller recasts sci-fi and pop music as parallel cultural forces that depended on one another to expand the horizons of books, music, and out-of-this-world imagery.
|
|
Deeton Charles will read from and sign her book,
Memoirs of a Fallen Angel
. In this stirring fantasy, Angela must overcome vampires, demons, and other adversaries to restore balance among the seven tribes of humanity. This blending of Christianity and Paganism explores legends, folklore, superstitions and beliefs across cultures. Don't miss this intriguing and intricate novel.
|
|
COLLECTORS' BOOK SALON:
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 6:30 PM
Meet other smart readers in the Rare Book Room every final Friday of the month, January through October. Glasses are filled and socializing begins at 6:30 PM, and at 7:15 an invited guest shares her or his bibliopassion in the Collector's Chat.
Evelyn Garlington
will present her Collector's Chat on papermaking. Evelyn is the Associate Director of Space Planning and Management at the University of Utah. She has an MFA in Studio Art and experience with museum design. In 1992 and 1993, she was Director and Curator of the American Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta, Georgia, the modern incarnation of the Dard Hunter Papermaking Museum founded at MIT in 1939, which later moved to the Institute of Paper Science and Technology in Appleton, Wisconsin. As sole employee of the Papermaking Museum, Evelyn unpacked, cataloged, designed, curated, and directed the new Museum on the Georgia Tech campus. She admits to having had little experience, at the outset, with paper. She will speak about the history of papermaking through as slide presentation which includes information on precursors to paper, the invention of papermaking, the spread of papermaking, printing and book making and her experiences in the development of the museum.
|
|
Author Brenda Stanley will read from her novel,
The Treasure of Cedar Creek.
In 1896, the isolated and vast state of Idaho is a haven for a polygamous splinter group called The Kingdom of Glory, which is hiding more than their outlawed practice of plural marriage. Join Brenda Stanley for this tantalizing glimpse into an outlawed culture.
|
|
James A. McLaughlin will read from his novel,
Bearskin
. Rice Moore is beginning to think his troubles are behind him. He’s found a job protecting a remote forest preserve in Appalachia where his responsibilities include tracking wildlife and refurbishing cabins. It’s hard, solitary work—perfect to hide away from the Mexican drug cartels he betrayed in Arizona. But when Rice finds the carcass of a bear on the grounds, his solitude is suddenly at risk.
|
|
Mark Matheson, Professor of English at the University of Utah, will lead a Books & Bridges lecture and discussion on the proposals of marriage in some of Shakespeare's greatest plays:
Love’s Labor’s Lost
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
Much Ado about Nothing
, and
The Winter’s Tale
. Throughout his work, Shakespeare presents marriage proposals in a surprising variety of ways, but whatever form they take, they are sensitive dramatic moments that enable us to explore the politics of a given play’s society and the independence of the female characters involved.
|
|
Julia Corbett will read from
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday
. In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions by seamlessly integrating personal narratives with morsels of highly digestible science and research. Each story delves into an overlooked aspect of our relationship with nature—insects, garbage, backyards, noise, open doors, animals, and language—and how we cover our tracks.
|
|
Author Steve Patrick examines words and our usage of them in regards to mindfulness and present-living in his book,
A Whole of the Whole
. He writes, “In the process of forming any single word, most of reality is left out. Words exclude in order to become shortcuts for naming. They are only arrows that point toward reality but don't represent it." For Patrick, experiencing reality firsthand, and directly, brings a joy of living and gratitude for life never imagined before.
|
|
Susan Purvis reads from her new memoir,
Go Find: My Journey to Find the Lost-And Myself
. Accompanied by her black Lab, Tasha, Purvis navigates her way through deep snow and challenging relationships to find passion and purpose in saving lives in the Colorado mountains.
|
|
Weller Book Works and Salt Lake Film Society are thrilled to welcome legendary director Don Coscarelli to Salt Lake City. Coscarelli will present a special screening of his cult horror classic
Phantasm
(remastered) at The Tower Theatre, followed by a signing of his new book,
True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking
.
Best known for his films
Phantasm
,
The Beastmaster
,
Bubba Ho-tep
, and
John Dies at the End
, now Coscarelli is taking you on a white-knuckle ride through the rough and tumble world of indie film. To purchase tickets visit
SLFS.org
.
To pre-order the book, visit our website
wellerbookworks.com
, or call 801-328-2586.
|
|
Revisit the world of B-Movies and terrible post-war food with author Christian McKay Heidicker, who will read from his new young adult novel,
Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower
.
Phoebe Lane is a lightning rod for monsters. She and her mom are forced to flee flesh-eating plants, blobs from outer space, and radioactive ants. They survive thanks to Phoebe’s dad—an invisible titan, whose giant eyes warn them where the next monster attack will take place. All Phoebe wants is to stop running from motel to motel and live a monster-free life. But when her mom mysteriously vanishes, Phoebe is left to fend for herself in what appears to be an idyllic small town.
Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower
challenges perceived notions of beauty, identity, and what it means to be a monster. Along with a book signing,
SPAM sandwiches and Jell-o will be served.
|
|
Author and
Literary Death Match
host Adrian Todd Zuniga discusses his latest novel,
Collision Theory,
which tells the story of Thomas Mullen who witnessed a woman jump to her death fifteen months ago. Now his parents call, pleading with him to come home, but it is not until his best friend shows up that Thomas is awakened. He soon finds himself on an unpredictable journey in which he is forced to confront difficult truths: girlfriends leave, mothers fall ill, and all attempts to deny pain will ultimately fail.
Adrian Todd Zuniga is the host/creator/CCO of
Literary Death Match
(now featured in over 60 cities worldwide) and host of
LDM Book Report
on YouTube. A WGA Award-nominated screenwriter, he co-wrote Madden NFL 18’s interactive movie
Longshot
(EA Sports).
|
|
Author Mark J Nelson will sign his book,
White Hat: The Military Career of Captain William Philo Clark
.
Known for his role in the arrest and killing of Crazy Horse and for the book he wrote,
The Indian Sign Language
, Clark was one of the Old Army’s renaissance men, by turns administrator, fighter, diplomat, explorer, and ethnologist. As such, Clark found himself at center stage during some of the most momentous events of the post–Civil War West: from Brigadier General George Crook’s infamous “Starvation March” to the Battle of Slim Buttes and the Dull Knife Fight, then to the attack against the Bannocks at Index Peak and Sitting Bull’s final fight against the U.S. Army.
|
|
Hugo award-winning and NY Times bestselling author John Scalzi will read from and sign the latest in his Interdependency series,
The Consuming Fire,
the dazzling follow-up to
The Collapsing Empire
– a space opera in a universe on the brink of destruction.
The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse. The Flow, the extra-dimensional pathway between the stars, is disappearing, leaving planets stranded. Billions of lives will be lost – unless desperate measures can be taken.
Emperox Grayland II, the leader of the Interdependency, is ready to take those measures. But it’s not that easy. There are those who believe the collapse of the Flow is a myth – or an opportunity for them to ascend to power.
While Grayland prepares for disaster, others prepare for civil war. A war that will take place in the halls of power, the markets of business and the altars of worship as much as between spaceships. Nothing about this power struggle will be simple or easy.. and all of human civilization is at stake.
Prioritized signing will be given to those who purchase
The Consuming Fire
through Weller Book Works - purchase in-store or order your copies now via our website,
wellerbookworks.com
, or call 801-328-2586.
|
|
Spencer W. McBride will dissect the "Myth of the Christian President" for Books & Bridges.
In his presentation, McBride will examine the history of an expectation embraced by millions of twenty-first century Americans that the president of the United States must be a Christian. The Constitution explicitly states that there should be no religious test for federal office. From where did this extra-constitutional expectation arise? McBride uncovers the origins of this belief in the partisan battles of the election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and demonstrates how the belief has evolved over the ensuing centuries.
|
|
COLLECTORS' BOOK SALON:
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 6:30 PM
Meet other smart readers in the Rare Book Room every final Friday of the month, January through October. Glasses are filled and socializing begins at 6:30 PM, and at 7:15 an invited guest shares her or his bibliopassion in the Collector's Chat.
Bertram Kundert
’s Collector’s Chat will present a brief history of Science Fiction. He’ll show copies of books and magazines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries representative of the different periods of Science Fiction development. These include
Amazing Stories
and
Astounding Science Fiction
as well as first editions from Fantasy Press, and some serial sets. He’ll talk about some of the early authors, their influences, and how Science Fiction has influenced mainstream writing.
|
|
A nice unused, circa 1916
LDS
Record of Missionary Labors, an octavo form book bound in flexible burgundy leather. Label mounted inside front cover explains how it was meant to be used. Contains forms for recording 26 types of missionary activities including time use, proselytizing tallies, numbers of books sold, loaned, or given, meetings, baptisms, expenses and amusements. A section of plain lined pages follow the forms.
$75
|
|
A great 1
st edition of Rizzoli’s 480 page folio
Ralph Lauren. It’s packed with full page images and text by the designer himself. Housed in a photographic paper covered slipcase with bumped edges. The book and its jacket are near fine.
$100
|
|
With a recently acquired collection of mysteries came some first editions of Dick Francis' older mysteries. These three are nice jacketed copies:
For Kicks. 1963. 1st American edition.
$150
Odds Against. 1965. 1st British edition.
$225
Blood Sport. 1967. 1st American edition.
$80
|
|
We have regular requests for Maynard Dixon volumes. Here is a fine 1st edition of Linda Jones Gibbs’ 2000 title,
Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon, an oblong quarto.
$50
|
|
A signed 1st edition of Shannon Hale’s 2003 fantasy,
The Goose Girl. A great copy with former owner’s small artful red stamp on title page.
$125
|
|
Weller Book Works | 801-328-2586 | books@wellerbookworks.com | wellerbookworks.com
Store hours: Monday-Thursday, 11 AM-8 PM | Friday-Saturday, 10 AM-9 PM | Sunday, 12 PM-5 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
