Access Utah

Richard Saunders is librarian and professor of history at Southern Utah University. He has written widely on the Mormons and American history topics. He will deliver the 36th annual Juanita Brooks lecture on Thursday, March 28, at 7:00 p.m. in Cox Auditorium on the campus of Dixie State University in St. George.

Michele Anderson says “I am what you might call a ‘homecomer.’ Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer and farmer, uses that word to describe people who have spent some time away, usually to pursue better opportunities in cities, and then choose to return to their rural roots.” Her recent opinion piece in the New York Times is headlined “Go Home to Your ‘Dying’ Hometown.” Michele Anderson says “I did, and it isn’t what I expected. I am more involved in social and racial justice, economic development and feminism than I ever was in a big city.”

Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life’s inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says “I grew up in Ferguson, Mo. No one ever heard of it, unless you lived elsewhere in St. Louis County. Then my family moved to Palestine – my father’s first home. A friend says, ‘Your parents really picked the garden spots.’ In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.

Here is the unforgettable story of Captain Tom Barnes, whom we first meet as he is leading British troops in Afghanistan. We then meet two young Afghani boys—and the man who trains one of them to fight against the infidel invaders. Finally, there are the family and friends who radiate out from these lives: the people on all sides of a war where virtually everyone is caught up in something unthinkable. But this novel regards them not as they see themselves but as the objects surrounding them do: a helmet, a bag of fertilizer, a beer glass, dog tags—and a horrific improvised explosive device that binds them all together by blowing one of them apart. A work of extraordinary humanity and hope, Anatomy of a Soldier takes its place among the great novels that articulate the lives of soldiers. In the boom of an instant, we see things we’ve never understood so clearly before.

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.

Native American Culinary Association founder, Chef Nephi Craig, is visiting Utah State University to conduct a series of foods presentations and deliver a lecture on his work with the “Three Sisters” of Native American cuisine—beans, corn and squash—and to teach nutrition and share cultural heritage.

More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease; including 30,000 in Utah who along with their 152,000 family caregivers face the highest rate per capita of the disease in the nation. In 2015, the Utah State Legislature declared Alzheimer’s a public health crisis, directing the Utah Department of Health to coordinate and implement the state’s response to this growing crisis.

Historians and novelists alike have described the vigilantism that took root in the gold-mining communities of Montana in the mid-1860s, but Mark C. Dillon is the first to examine the subject through the prism of American legal history, considering the state of criminal justice and law enforcement in the western territories and also trial procedures, gubernatorial politics, legislative enactments, and constitutional rights.

Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers’ heads for a long time to come.