Set in Salt Lake City at the height of the Great Depression, Linda Sillitoe’s last novel opens with three little girls, eleven-year-old triplets, skipping in front of their house at 1300 South, across from Liberty Park. They giggle lightly as they chant: 

Prin-cess Al-ice in Liberty Park
Munch-es ba-nan-as ’til way after dark.

Princess Alice is an elephant the children of Utah purchased by donating nickels and dimes to a circus. The girls don’t know this, but her handler takes the mammoth princess out on late-night strolls around the park when the moon is out. What they do know is that the elephant sometimes escapes and goes on a rampage, crashing through front-yard fences and collecting collars of clothesline laundry around her neck, a persistent train of barking dogs following behind. The girls’ father is a police officer who is investigating a boy’s disappearance. As the case unfolds, the perception of the park, with its eighty acres of trees and grass, will change from the epitome of freedom to a place to be avoided, even as Princess Alice moves to a secure confinement at a new zoo at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. The story is loosely based on the exploits of a real live elephant that lived in Liberty Park a decade before Sillitoe’s childhood in the neighborhood.  

The first book-length treatment of Utah’s distinctive food heritage, this volume contains work by more than sixty subject-matter experts, including scholars, community members, event organizers, journalists, bloggers, photographers, and food producers. It features recipes and photographs of food and beverages. Utah’s food history is traced from precontact Native American times through the arrival of multinational Mormon pioneers, miners, farmers, and other immigrants to today’s moment of “foodie” creativity, craft beers, and “fast-casual” restaurant-chain development. Contributors also explore the historical and cultural background for scores of food-related tools, techniques, dishes, traditions, festivals, and distinctive ingredients from the state’s religious, regional, and ethnic communities as well as Utah-based companies. In a state much influenced by Latter-day Saint history and culture, iconic items like Jell-O salads, funeral potatoes, fry sauce, and the distinctive “Utah scone” have emerged as self-conscious signals of an ecumenical Utah identity. Scholarly but lively and accessible, this book will appeal to both the general reader and the academic folklorist. 
 

Willis William Ritter, United States District Judge for the District of Utah from 1949 until his death on March 4, 1978, was the one judge whose name was familiar among those who had little or no idea of the difference between judicial jurisdictions. Many knew him by the broad gestures with which he challenged bureaucracies and the federal government itself. He was, legally speaking, a friend to the underdog. Yet at his death scarcely a friend was left and he had become the object of ridicule, outrage, pity, and contempt.

Ritter was clearly ahead of his time, for his opinions on criminal justice, police interrogation, and the rights to counsel have now become accepted standards in jurisprudence. They are, indeed, so universally accepted that few if any viewers of televised police court dramas would even question them. In his personal life he was a man flawed on a grand scale and he lived a life fraught with contradictions. This is his compelling story, compellingly recounted.

Fremont is a culture (ca. 300–1300 A.D.) first defined by archaeologist Noel Morss in 1928 based on characteristics unique to the area. Initially thought to be a simple socio-political system, recent reassessments of the Fremont assume a more complex society. This volume places Fremont rock art studies in this contemporary context. Author Steven Simms offers an innovative model of Fremont society, politics, and worldview using the principles of analogy and current archaeological evidence. Simms takes readers on a trip back in time by describing what a typical Fremont hamlet or residential area might have looked like a thousand years ago, including the inhabitants' daily activities. François Gohier's captivating photographs of Fremont art and artifacts offer an engaging complement to Simms's text, aiding us in our understanding of the lives of these ancient people.

Winner of the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Winner of the Society for American Archaeology Book Award for Public Audience. 

In February 2000, while excavating his property in St. George, Utah, Sheldon Johnson turned over a piece of ground and discovered a fully preserved dinosaur footprint. That track was the first of many fossils to be uncovered. Five years later, the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm was established to preserve one of the richest and oldest dinosaur-age fossil sites in Utah.

Tracks in Deep Time presents, for the first time, an engaging, thoroughly readable account of the history, geology, and paleontology of this important site. Two hundred million years ago, Lake Dixie covered the site. Within its waters and along its shores, a diverse ecosystem of dinosaurs, early crocodylians, fishes, plants, and other organisms thrived, leaving behind thousands of footprints and other fossils preserved in layers of rock. Unusual fossils found here include the world’s largest collection of tracks left by swimming dinosaurs and one of only six traces known to have been made by a sitting, meat-eating dinosaur. With approachable text and lavish, full-color photographs and illustrations, Jerald Harris and Andrew Milner describe how geologists and paleontologists have painstakingly reconstructed a vivid “snapshot” of life from the Early Jurassic epoch.