Author Event: Annette McGivney & Betsy Gaines Quammen

With Maria's Bookshop

McGivney and Gaines Quammen will speak about their new books, both recently published by Torrey House Press.

Annette McGivney is the author of Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America's Misguided Quest for Wellness.

About the book:

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 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.

Betsy Gaines Quammen is the author of This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories That Shape America

About the book:

This Haunted Land investigates some of America's most enduring legends and uncovers how ghost stories can illuminate some of the most unsettling parts of history. With curiosity, a touch of skepticism, and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Betsy Gaines Quammen takes readers on a journey into haunted towns, forgotten lives, and abandoned places. From a once-booming uranium mining community in Colorado to a fort on the coast of Florida that predates the United States itself, this riveting exploration of memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can only be defeated by bearing witness to the specters of the past.

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