09/05/2026
Thursday, Sept 10th at 6pm!
We are very excited to welcome Betsy Gaines Quammen to celebrate her new book, “This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories That Shape America.” We will also be joined by Annette McGivney to celebrate her new book, “Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America’s Misguided Quest for Wellness.”
👻 In “This Haunted Land,” Betsy Gaines Quammen investigates some of America’s most enduring ghost stories and uncovers how ghost stories can help us come to terms with our unsettled past. With curiosity, a bit of skepticism, and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Gaines Quammen takes readers on a riveting, sometimes spooky journey into the haunted towns, lands, waters, and parts of history that we too often ignore. From a once-booming uranium mine community now entombed in Colorado’s Mesa County, to America’s oldest fort on the east coast of Florida, This Haunted Land interweaves memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety, and shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can be defeated by listening to the specters of the past.
🧘 For “Plastic Shaman,” in October 2009, more than fifty people attended a $10,000-per-person wellness retreat led by a celebrity self-help guru. For these enlightenment seekers, their time in Sedona, Arizona, culminated in a fake Native American sweat lodge ceremony. Three of them would not make it out alive.
This tragedy exposes the dangerous truth about the booming $2 trillion wellness industry where promises of spiritual awakening and financial success often mask dangerous practices underpinned by cultural appropriation and commodification of the nature. Journalist Annette McGivney explores this world, exposing the manipulation and greed that allow charismatic influencers to prey on vulnerable people in search of happiness and healing - no matter the cost.
