The Adams State University Department of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Political Science, and Spanish will host Hampton Sides, national best-selling author of In the Kingdom of Ice, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. with a book signing followed by a lecture/reading at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 14, in Carson Auditorium.
Sides, editor-at-large for Outside magazine, is a regular contributor to National Geographic, and has written for such periodicals as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The American Scholar, and Newsweek. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice named a Finalist for the National Magazine Awards in feature writing. He teaches literary journalism and narrative history at Colorado College, where he serves as Journalist in Residence.
Ghost Soldiers, a World War II narrative which has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages, was the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, "The Great Raid." Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction and the Discover Award from Barnes & Noble.
Side's Blood and Thunder (2006), a sweeping epic about the conquest of the American West and the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and was selected as the year's best history title by both the History Book Club and the Western Writers of America. Blood and Thunder was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program "The American Experience" and is currently under development as a television miniseries.
Hellhound On His Trail (Doubleday, April 2010) concerns the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and the international manhunt for assassin James Earl Ray. The book was the subject of the PBS documentary "Roads to Memphis" and has been optioned by Universal Pictures for the screen.
Side's most recent book, In the Kingdom of Ice, tells the story of the grand and terrible polar voyage the USS Jeannette (1879-81), an American-led attempt on the North Pole through the Bering Strait that ended in Siberia. Reaching #3 on the New York Times bestseller's list, In the Kingdom of Ice won wide praise among critics and has become an instant classic of Arctic survival literature. It is now being developed as a limited series for television.
A native of Memphis with a bachelor's in history from Yale, Sides lives in Santa Fe with his family. In 2015, he was a Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. Hampton serves as an advisory board member of the Authors Guild of America, the Mayborn Literary Non-Fiction Conference, and the Traverse City National Writers Series. He is a past fellow of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Edwards Media Program at Stanford.
Sides is now at work on a book about the 1950 Korean War Battle of Chosin Reservoir.
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