All The Wild That Remains: A Reading and Book Signing with David Gessner

All The Wild That Remains: A Reading and Book Signing with David Gessner

Ken Sanders Rare Books and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) are pleased to announce a reading and book signing with David Gessner on Friday, May 1st from 7-9 PM. The event will be held at Ken Sanders Rare Books in downtown Salt Lake (268 S 200 E). Author David Gessner will be reading from his new book, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West. Books will be available for signing and purchase (hardcover, $26.95). This event is free and open to the public.

David Gessner is the award-winning author of Return of the Osprey, My Green Manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles, and other books. He currently lives and teaches in Wilmington, North Carolina. All The Wild That Remains is a deeply felt homage to the West and to the two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it. Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the American West. They remain two of the most renowned writers of the region, capturing the beauty and complexity of the western landscape.

In his new book, the award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists in All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West [release date April 20]. Gessner travels from Stegner’s birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey’s pilgrimages to Arches. He braids together the stories of these two greats, asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. Abbey and Stegner were extraordinarily prescient, and Gessner’s gaze is resolutely on the future. What is the future of a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling? What should be done about an ever-increasing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death? How might two environmental thinkers with radically different personalities—a competent, mature advocate (Stegner) and a monkey-wrenching anarchist (Abbey)—have responded to the crisis? Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American consumption, and fighting environmental injustice.

This event is co-presented by Ken Sanders Rare Books and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). Since 1983, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) has been the only independent organization working full-time to defend America’s redrock wilderness from oil and gas development, unnecessary road construction, rampant off-road vehicle use, and other threats to Utah’s wilderness-quality lands.

Notable quotes about David Gessner’s book, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West:

“Two extraordinary men and one remarkable book. To understand how we understand the natural world, you need to read this book.” — Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth

“An excellent study of two difficult men.” — Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and The Last Kind Words Saloon

“A travel book, yes, a literary memoir, yes, and a profound meditation on our myths and shadows. Anyone who loves the American West will be enraptured by this book. It is a wonderful piece of work.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America

“This book rubs Abbey and Stegner's history in the dust and sand so beloved to them, posing these two late icons among voices, landscapes, and arguments that endure in western wilderness, deftly creating a larger geographic chronicle.” — Craig Childs, author of House of Rain and Apocalyptic Planet
“Praise David Gessner for reawakening us, in these climactically challenged times, to the wisdom of our two most venerated literary grandfathers of the American West, to remind us of our wilder longings, to incite in us a fury, that we might act—even now—to defend all the wild that remains.” — Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Contents May Have Shifted
“To understand the truth of the Desert West, read Stegner. To understand one writer's emotional response to that desert and to our thoughtless destruction of wilderness, read Abbey. To understand the two writers as men of their times—and ours—read Gessner: for his honesty, compassion, humility, scholarship, and sensibility.” — Stephen Trimble, author of Bargaining for Eden