Main Library

*Both talks for Tara Westover (4:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.) have filled to capacity.  Both talks, however, will be LIVESTREAMED and archived for remote viewing.  

Livestream Link Here

In addition, the Sun Valley Community School will be hosting a viewing party for the 6:30 p.m. talk on their Trail Creek Campus in Hagenbuch Hall, the Stevens’ Family Big Room.  Attendance is FREE and light refreshments will be provided.

The Community Library presents Tara Westover to speak about her critically acclaimed memoir Educated.

About the book:

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag.” In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when Tara’s older brother became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

About the author:

Tara Westover is an American author living in the UK. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014.

There will be a book signing following the talk.

The Community Library presents David Quammen to speak on his latest book The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.

David Quammen is an author and journalist whose books include The Song of the Dodo(1996), The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), and  Spillover (2014), a work on the science, history, and human impacts of emerging diseases (especially viral diseases), which was short-listed for eight national and international awards and won three.  More recently he has released two short books drawn from Spillover and updated to stand alone: Ebola (2014) and The Chimp and the River (2015). In the past thirty years he has also published a few hundred pieces of short nonfiction—feature articles, essays, columns—in magazines such as Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, Esquire, The Atlantic, Powder, and Rolling Stone.  He writes occasional Op Eds for The New York Times and reviews for The New York Times Book Review.  Quammen has been honored with an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award.  He is a Contributing Writer for National Geographic, in whose service he travels often, usually to wild and remote places. Home is Bozeman, Montana.

A book signing will follow the talk. 

This program is presented in partnership with The Nature Conservancy in Idaho and The College of Idaho.

Professor Valencius teaches and writes about American environments and American science and medicine at Boston College. Her classes include “Leeches to Lasers,” a survey of U.S. health and medicine, and “This Land is Your Land,” which introduces U.S. environmental history. She is currently working on a book about earthquakes and contemporary energy, focused on the emerging science of induced seismology and hydraulic fracturing. Professor Valencius’s 2013 book The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes explored the impact and continuing scientific importance of great nineteenth-century quakes in the Mississippi Valley. Her first book, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, won the 2003 George Perkins Marsh Award as best book of the year from the American Society for Environmental History. Two articles – about health in women’s letters and about Sacagawea’s illness during the Lewis and Clark expedition – won awards in women’s history. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Dibner Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

This is the story of a woman’s solo transformational journey on the sacred path of the the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain. 

In collaboration with Hospice & Palliative Care of the Wood River Valley.

Extremis is a 2016 American short documentary film following the doctors, families, and patients as they make end-of-life decisions. It is directed and produced by Dan Krauss.

A discussion, led by Lisa Wild, executive director of Hospice & Palliative Care of the Wood River Valley, will follow the film.