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D.G.Wills Books

7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, Ca. 92037 (858)456-1800
HOURS: Monday-Saturday 10am-7pm; Sunday 11am-6pm
La Jolla's largest collection of new and used scholarly books; and home of the La Jolla Cultural Society

EMAIL

Visit the D.G.Wills Books YouTube Channel, featuring past appearances by Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Maureen Dowd, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Billy Collins, Patricia Neal with Stephen Michael Shearer, Edward Albee, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Oliver Stone. 
 
D.G.Wills Books events on Book TV, C-SPAN:
Professor Yunte Huang discussing his book Charlie Chan.
Journalist Dave Zirin discusses his book  Welcome to the Terrordome.
 
D.G.Wills Books events  on UCSD TV:
Professor Robert Polito and Patricia Patterson discussing
Professor Andrew Feenberg discussing his collection The Essential Marcuse.
 
 
D.G.Wills Books events on TSN: THE SCIENCE NETWORK:
Professor V.S. Ramachandran dicusses his book The Tell Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. 

Professor Lawrence M. Krauss discusses his book Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life In Science.

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Upcoming Events
 

Poet
NORMAN FISCHER

reads from his new book

CONFLICT
Thursday, February 2, 7pm

 

Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. For many years he has taught at the San Francisco Zen Center, the oldest and largest of the new Buddhist organizations in the West, where he served as Co-abbot from 1995-2000. He is presently a Senior Dharma Teacher there as well as the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. Among his many books are Taking Our Places: the Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up; Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls; Opening to You: Zen-inspired Translations of the Psalms and numerous books of poetry, including Precisely the Point being Made; Slowly but Dearly and I Was Blown Back. He is also the author of Jerusalem Moonlight, a prose memoir about Judaism and Buddhism. Norman Fischer has been particularly interested in the application of Zen to issues of Western culture and everyday life in the world. His Zen essays on topics ranging from racism to monasticism to romance appear frequently in Tricycle, Shambhala Sun and Buddhist Writing. In addition to his regular work at Zen Center and with Everyday Zen, he has taught extensively with his old friend, the late Rabbi Alan Lew, on the relationship between Buddhist and Jewish practice. He is the co-founder, with Rabbi Lew, of Makor Or Jewish Meditation Center in San Francisco. Conflict, Norman Fisher’s recently published book-length poem, is an exploration of conflict within the self; conflict between friends, lovers, communities, nations, war and torture.

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Renowned Canadian author
GARY GEDDES
will discuss his new book
DRINK THE
BITTER ROOT:

A Search for Justice and Healing in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tuesday, February 14, 7pm

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Drink the Bitter Root is an international story about the ethical and environmental footprint world nations are leaving in Africa in their determined efforts to destabilize and loot the continent. In the spirit of Robert Kaplan and Samantha Power, Gary Geddes sets out in search of justice, healing, and reconciliation. He begins his journey at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, then travels to Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic  Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, crossing Lake Victoria and the Great Rift Valley, where human life began.

Geddes' quest  takes the form of an intimate personal travelogue. Although he confronts the dark realities of abduction, rape, mutilation, and murder, drawing on painful encounters, interviews, and adventures that occur along the way, Geddes also brings back amazing stories of survival and unexpected moments of grace. His poet’s eye and self-deprecating humor draw us ever more deeply into the lives of some amazing Africans, while never forgetting the complicity we all feel in the face of tragic events unfolding there. In the words of author and Africanist Ian Smillie, Drink the Bitter Root is not only poignant, literate, and funny, but also “a deeply textured journey without maps into the unexplored rifts of sub-Saharan Africa, the human experience, and the psyche. It’s also the masterful handling of a full palette.”

Gary Geddes is an internationally acclaimed travel writer who has been compared to Bruce Chatwin, Michael Ondaatje, and William Least Heat-Moon. He has written and edited more than thirty-five books, which have sold close to half a million copies in seven languages. His memoir Sailing Home and his travelogue Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things were both Canadian bestsellers.

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Poets 
Norman Schaefer
reads from his collection 
The Sunny Top 
of California:
 
Sierra Nevada Poems and a Story

___and___
John Brandi
reads from his book
 
Seeding The Cosmos:
New and Selected Haiku

Friday, April  20 7pm

Norman Schaefer has been a laborer and gardener, climber, and expert Sierra Nevada backpacker for over twenty years. But more than that he is a unique poet. He sat in on one of my early poetry workshops when I was teaching at UC Davis in the early 90s, and after the first year I told him, “You’re good enough now to keep going on your own and leave other influences behind.” He has stayed in touch with me though and kept me up on his long mountain trips and also his writing. We did a poetry reading together one time in Davis where we each read West Coast mountain poems. I have seen his work become more compressed, refined, and intense over time. Many of his poems show the influence of Chinese classical poetry and a bit of Han-shan, the “Cold Mountain” poet. Even so they all have Schaefer’s own stamp. Part of his uniqueness is the modesty and underlying humor woven through the poems. He is a mountain lover without showy piety or bravado. I know of nobody else who catches the feel of the high country rocks, trails, and winds with the immediacy that Norman does. A story of his life and his practice of walking in the Sierra weaves through the poems. Yet he is not a single-minded fanatic—just a dedicated person (in the old style) of the Way. And as it works out, a fine poet as well.  GARY SNYDER

John Brandi, a native of Southern California, grew up traveling the Big Sur coast, the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the Mojave Desert.  Then he joined the Peace Corps, worked with Andean farmers in their struggle for civil liberties and land rights, and began publishing his poetry in hand-sewn mimeograph editions as part of the “do-it-yourself” phenomenon that preceded the alternative-press movement.  Returning to North America, he met Beat Generation poets Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Allen Ginsberg while living in California, and in 1971 moved to New Mexico. He still resides there, living in the northern mountains with his wife, poet Renée Gregorio. During Brandi’s early years in the Southwest, he traveled with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, and compiled That Back Road In, the first of his many memorable poetry collections. He stayed alive by teaching as an itinerant poet and in 1979 received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.  San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman has said of Brandi: “He has been an open roader for much of his life and like his two great forebears, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars, the details of his sojournings … infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings— compassionate, mischievous, loving and righteous. New Mexico writer John Nichols, in his introduction to Brandi’s book of essays Reflections in the Lizard’s Eye, wrote: “The way Brandi interprets the world is rich with the guts and gusto of old-fashioned magicians. His is a bittersweet, loving vision, as well as a hardass, heartfelt swansong to the disappearing vestiges of a more truthful way of life.” 


Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books

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Christopher Hitchens

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Director Oliver Stone

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Historian and Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert

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Francoise Gilot

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Vogue magazine photo of Francoise Gilot at the original store

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Michael McClure

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, Director of the Neurosciences Institute, with U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle with Mrs. Searle

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Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen

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Quincy Troupe

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Iris Chang

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Gerry Spence

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Noted editor Robert Weil, editing a Patricia Highsmith manuscript for W.W. Norton & Co.

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Loeb Classical Library and Western Philosophy wall

Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books 

NORMAN MAILER, l995

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Allen Ginsberg, l994

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The New York Times Pulitzer Prize Columnist Maureen Dowd

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Jill Abramson, Executive Editor, The New York Times, with Maureen Dowd

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Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2001-2003

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Gore Vidal, November 2005

Listen to this event

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Gore Vidal with Professor Dennis Altman

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Gore Vidal, March l998, with noted South African playwright Athol Fugard in audience

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Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, February 1995

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James D. Watson and Francis Crick with their model of the DNA molecule, the Double Helix, at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, l953

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Nobel Laureate James D. Watson, September 2007

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Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott

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Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis

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Three & One-Half Time Pulitzer Prize Playwright Edward Albee

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Pulitzer Prize poet Gary Snyder

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Oscar-Winning Actress Patricia Neal with her biographer Stephen Michael Shearer

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Patricia Neal holding a model of "Gort" from the science fiction film classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still"

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Richard C. Atkinson, President Emeritus of the University of California, former UCSD Chancellor and former Director of the National Science Foundation

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Renowned scientist Freeman Dyson 

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Freeman Dyson with Mrs. Dyson

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A visit from Oscar Nominated and Emmy Award Winning Actor Paul Giamatti

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A visit from Jim Belushi, 2003

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Jim Belushi at the original store, l988

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Claude Picasso and Francoise Gilot

More photos of previous events

D.G.Wills Books
7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla
(858) 456-1800