Sun, Mar 29
|Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse
Jack Ratliff, Riding the White Bull: The Making of a Navy SEAL
In conversation with NYT best-selling author Hampton Sides. In this clear-eyed memoir, Ratliff revisits a life of risk and adventure—college in the 1950s, open roads, wild jobs, and the punishing birth of Navy SEAL training—offering hard-won wisdom from a generation that refused to live safely.
Date, Time & Location
Mar 29, 2026, 4:30 PM MDT
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
About the Event
Join us in-store or register to watch on Zoom.
Call the store to pre-order your copy of Riding the White Bull, (505) 988-4226.
In this vivid memoir, a young man’s search for meaning takes him from college in the 1950’s to the edge of everything—riding a wild bull in a rodeo, hitchhiking across America, battling forest fires, commanding a destroyer under a mercurial captain, and enduring the punishing trials of UDT-SEAL training. Along the way, he finds adventure, absurdity, and moments of unexpected grace. Gritty, funny, and unsentimental, the book offers a rare insider’s look at the formative years of the Navy’s most elite warriors and a generation that refused to live safely.
About the Author
Raised in the remote West Texas town of Sonora, Jack Ratliff took undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas. He spent four years in the Navy, first as a deck officer on…