Reserve your FREE ticket for the Local Authors in Conversation event.
On October 24th, Country Bookshelf has the pleasure of welcoming Betsy Gaines Quammen and David Quammen to discuss Betsy's new book True West.
Attendees should contact events@countrybookshelf.com with any accessibility concerns.
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop. Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen interrogates it all as she seeks to reconcile the anger and misunderstandings that continue to be fueled by the West’s enduring myths and complex history. Whether sitting down with a local resident seeking to protect his rural Utah town from Antifa or talking with grassroots organizers working across ideological divides, Gaines Quammen brings to life connections and contradictions that shape our politics and our lives far beyond the West.
Betsy Gaines Quammen is a historian and writer who examines the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities. She received a PhD in history from Montana State University, her dissertation focusing on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts, and an MS in environmental studies from University of Montana. Betsy is the author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, David Quammen.
David Quammen is an American author and journalist whose eighteen books include The Song of the Dodo (1996), Spillover (2012), The Tangled Tree (2018), and Breathless (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. His most recent book is The Heartbeat of the Wild: Dispatches from Landscapes of Wonder, Peril, and Hope, drawn from his twenty years writing about wild creatures and wild places on assignments for National Geographic Magazine. Quammen’s shorter work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The New York Review of Books, among other magazines, and his Op Eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers. He’s a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award and has received several awards for his books, including the Premio Letterario Merck, given in Rome. He shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author American Zion (2020) and True West (2023), plus three borzois, a cross-eyed cat, and a python.
