Reading and Signing with Phillip Fradkin

Reading and Book Signing With Philip Fradkin Author of Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife Ken Sanders Rare Books is pleased to announce a reading and book signing with Philip Fradkin, author of Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife on Tuesday, September 20th at 7:00 p.m. at our downtown bookstore (268 South 200 East). Copies of Everett Ruess ($24.95, Hardcover) will be available for purchase and signing at the event. This event is free and open to the public.
Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest. In the first probing biography of Everett Ruess, acclaimed environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond the myth to reveal the realities of Ruess’s short life and mysterious death and finds in the artist’s astonishing afterlife a lonely hero who persevered. As Fradkin explains: I have had a personal investment in the books I have written, but none to a greater extent than with this book. To varying degrees, we all searched for something during our early years. Like Everett, I was raised in the Unitarian Church with its emphasis on independent thinking, had progressive parents who believed in letting children find their own way, traveled West when a teenager to work among strangers, and embarked alone on a quest, hitchhiking for six months through Europe. One major difference was that I returned with no written record of my journeys; Everett disappeared, but left diaries, letters, and illustrations to document his wanderings.
This book is the story of all of us and our loneliness and confusion during the teenage years, only writ larger because Everett went to extremes. At that age our lives spread out like a topographical map before us, offering numerous diverging trails through the wilderness to choose from. How wonderful, how frightening, and how dangerous those years were. In searching for a meaningful Everett Ruess, I sought the reality of who he was, or as close to that reality as I could get. I found the real Ruess to be far more interesting than the mythic one.
Everett was a hero, not because of what he accomplished, but because he persevered. His story dates back at least as far as Parsifal and the Arthurian legend of the innocent youth who embarks on a quest for the Holy Grail. It resembles the more contemporary tales of Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caufield, and Christopher McCandless, who undertook odysseys of adolescence down the Mississippi River, on the streets of New York City, and into the wilds of Alaska.
Philip L. Fradkin is the author of thirteen highly praised books, including Wallace Stegner and the American West; A River No More: The Colorado River and the West; Fallout; Stagecoach; The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself, and (with Alex L. Fradkin) The Left Coast: California on the Edge. He has worked as a journalist, as a lecturer for both UC Berkeley and Stanford University as well as working as an editor for Audubon. He has won numerous awards including sharing in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Los Angeles Times for coverage of the 1965 Watts racial conflict, a Sierra Club Media Award, and two Pulitzer Prize nominations.
For more information: Ken Sanders Rare Books 268 South 200 East, SLC, UT 801-521-3819 www.kensandersbooks.com books@dreamgarden.com