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D.G.Wills Books

7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, Ca. 92037 (858)456-1800
HOURS: Monday-Saturday 10am-5pm; Sunday 11am-5pm
La Jolla's largest collection of new and used scholarly books; and home of the La Jolla Cultural Society.

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Visit the D.G.Wills Books YouTube Channel, featuring past appearances by Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Maureen Dowd, Freeman Dyson, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Billy Collins, Iris Chang, Patricia Neal with Stephen Michael Shearer, Edward Albee, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, and Senator Byron L. Dorgan. 
 
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

UCSD Professor Amelia M. Glaser
 will read from Ukrainian poet
Halyna Kruk’s
A Crash Course in
Molotov Cocktails

& Olga Livshin will read from Ukrainian poet
Lyudmyla Khersonska’s
Today is a Different War
 Saturday, April 1st, 7pm


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A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine. These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary.  Leading readers into the world’s darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself. Halyna Kruk was born in 1974 in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and four children’s books.  Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and she has translated from several languages into Ukrainian. She has served as vice president of the Ukrainian PEN, holds a Ph.D in Ukrainian literature, and is professor of European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv. Amelia M Glaser translates primarily from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. She is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She is currently writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.


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Today is a Different War is a striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. The voices assembled here veer from the frightened and disoriented. No other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what’s in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.” Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian. In 2022 her joint volume with the poet Boris Khersonsky, her husband, came out in English translation from Lost Horse Press, titled The Country where Everyone’s Name is Fear. Khersonska was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change” by Words without Borders. Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations appear in The New York Times, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman. Livshin is a co-translator of A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry.

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Renowned author
 
Lawrence Goldstone
will read from and discuss his critically acclaimed book
NOT WHITE ENOUGH:
The Long, Shameful Road to
Japanese American Internment

 Saturday, April 29 at 7 PM

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Lawrence Goldstone’s Not White Enough is a comprehensive examination of a century of bigotry against Chinese and Japanese Americans that culminated in the infamous Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. United States: the landmark ruling that upheld the illegal imprisonment of more than 100,000 innocent men, women, and children who were falsely accused of endangering national security during World War II. This book is the first to trace the full arc of prejudice against Asian Americans that made internment inevitable and serves as a legal and political history of anti-Asian racism, beginning with the California gold rush and ending with Korematsu.  Goldstone examines each of the key Supreme Court decisions—including Wong Kim Ark, Ozawa, and Thind—as not simply jurisprudence but as expressions of political will. He chronicles the political history of racism that made Japanese internment almost inevitable, highlighting the key roles San Francisco mayors James D. Phelan and Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, California Attorney General Ulysses Webb, and future Chief Justice Earl Warren played in instigating some of the most egregious anti-Asian legislation, all for political convenience and gain. Goldstone also illustrates Chinese and Japanese immigrants’ courage and determination to carve out a place for themselves in a country that did everything it could to reject them.

 

Lawrence Goldstone is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies; Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution; The Activist: John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, and the Myth of Judicial Review; Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865–1903 and On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Toronto Star, Salon, and Slate, among others. 

 

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“Lawrence Goldstone’s book, both lively and well-documented, shows us that the shocking mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II did not come out of thin air; it was based on a century of growing anti-Asian racism. He also celebrates people we remember too seldom: the heroic figures who fought to undo this great crime.”—Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books

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Christopher Hitchens

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Oscar-Winning Actor Sean Penn

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Oscar-Winning 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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N. Parthasarathi, Indian Consul General, San Francisco; and Nirupama Rao, Ambassador of India to the U.S.

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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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Ted Burke, Norman Mailer, Dennis Wills

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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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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