Access Utah

Periodically we join together as a UPR community to share what we're reading. On Wednesday's Access Utah we're doing it again, but with a twist: We want your list of the best books of 2015.

On Today’s Access Utah we continue our series on Mass Shootings in America by asking how the media should respond. Our guests include Tom Teves, whose son Alex was killed in the mass shooting in Aurora Colorado. Teves is a founder of No Notoriety a campaign that urges news outlets to limit how much they use a gunman’s name and photograph. Tom Teves says the hope is to curb shootings by denying many perpetrators what they want: fame.

Writer Ceiridwen Terrill writes about how, at a particularly sad and frightening time in her life, a wolf dog was the kind of companion she was searching for. In her book, "Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs," she talks about an animal who's heart is divided between the woman she loves, and the desire to roam free. In the end, Terrill realized she must confront the reality of taming a half-wild animal. We spoke with Ceirdwen Terrill in 2012, and today on the program we revisit that conversation.

Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year for 2015 isn't a word at all; it's an emoji, one of those little faces that you see all over on social media. And I'm hearing extreme glottal stops (as in "the new football coach at USC is Clay Helhhh-uhhn (Helton)" and "strength" pronounced as "shtrength." It's enough to drive a language purist to distraction.

In response to the San Bernardino shootings, President Obama said, "We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world."

Ron Carlson’s latest novel, “Return to Oakpine,” is a tender and nostalgic portrait of western American life. In it, Carlson tells the story of four middle-aged friends who once played in a band while growing up together in small-town Wyoming. One of them, Jimmy Brand, left for New York City and became an admired novelist. Thirty years later in 1999, he’s returned to die. Craig Ralston and Frank Gunderson never left Oakpine; Mason Kirby, a Denver lawyer, is back on family business. Jimmy’s arrival sends the other men’s dreams and expectations, realized and deferred, whirling to the surface. And now that they are reunited, getting the band back together might be the most essential thing they ever do.

Should Utah accept refugees from Syria? That’s the question we’ll address on Thursday’s Access Utah. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah's members of Congress want to stop Syrian refugees from entering the country until new security checks are implemented, a process that could take years. Senator Orrin Hatch says “It's irresponsible, particularly after [the Paris] attacks, to reduce this issue to one of mere compassion."

Our guest for the hour today is Utah author David G. Pace whose debut novel Dream House on Golan Drive is published by Signature Books. It is the year 1972, and Riley Hartley finds that he, his family, community, and his faith are entirely indistinguishable from each other.He is eleven. A young woman named Lucy claims God has revealed to her that she is to live with Riley’s family.

When NPR’s Robert Siegel suggested that the harpsichord is viewed as old and not enormously popular, Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani responded: “I think these things would only matter to Americans. As long as there's a place for sundials and gardening and beautiful things, there's a place for the harpsichord. I completely reject the idea that the harpsichord is old and I reject the idea that something old is therefore not good or not popular. Lots of things are old. Lots of traditions are old. I like it because it's beautiful.”

Photographer Jonathan Diaz says “I have always been fascinated by the power and poignancy of a child’s imagination. Children are not afraid to dream big: they believe anything is possible. They are innocent. With this innocence comes dreams and honest aspirations that, from the view of an outsider, might seem impossible. However, through the eyes of a child, such dreams are absolutely obtainable.” Diaz is creator and photographer of Anything Can Be and a book “True Heroes” which features the dreams of 21 children are or were fighting cancer. Each child is featured in a professional photo shoot depicting his or her dreams. And 21 authors (including such best-selling writers as Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Ally Condie, and Jennifer a. Neilsen) were commissioned to write a story, featuring one of the children as hero.