Book Reviews
A Visit to the Blues
Photographer Michael Loyd Young documents Delta music
by Maria Browning
Photographer Michael Loyd Young has documented cultural practices around the world, but in Blues, Booze & BBQ he turns his camera on a community a little closer to home, capturing the raucous, passionate culture of the Delta blues in more than seventy photographs of musicians, audiences, music festivals, juke joints—and, yes, barbecue.
Published Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Uncovering a Forgotten Epidemic
A bizarre disease that drives some victims into fatal sleep and leaves others languishing in mental illness proves a fascinating subject for Memphis author Molly Caldwell Crosby
by Michael Ray Taylor
Epidemics of encephalitis lethargica—sleeping sickness—have long inspired literature, writes Memphis-based science author Molly Caldwell Crosby in Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains one of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries. "Sleeping Beauty," "Rip Van Winkle," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" are but three well-known stories written after separate outbreaks of the mysterious illness, which can cause patients to sleep for months or years, if they ever awaken at all. In Asleep, Crosby, author of the 2006 nonfiction bestseller The American Plague, has written a tale as timeless and disturbing as its fictional predecessors. Crosby will read from and sign copies of Asleep at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on March 2, and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on March 16.
Published Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Diving Into Civil War History
Historian Tom Chaffin raises the H.L. Hunley and chronicles the birth of submarine warfare
by Chris Scott
Among the technological firsts of the American Civil War was an odd little boat, built by a group of dedicated entrepreneurs, that heralded the age of underwater exploration and warfare. In The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy, Knoxville historian Tom Chaffin details the remarkable story of the first submarine to sink an enemy ship.
Published Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Fragile, Broken, Burned
In his new story collection, Richard Bausch digs beneath the tough exterior of his protagonists—male and female alike—to find their fears, weaknesses, and dreams
by Clay Risen
Memphis writer Richard Bausch has long been known as a master of macho, a chronicler of men. But as his latest story collection, Something Is Out There, demonstrates, Bausch is, if anything, a master of the anti-macho, a writer who digs beneath the tough exterior of his protagonists—male and female alike—to find their fears, weaknesses, and dreams.
Published Wednesday, 10 February 2010
A Truth Universally Acknowledged
With Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, Beth Pattillo writes a romance Jane Austen fans will love
by Faye Jones
To review a book with Jane Austen at its heart is, for a passionate Austen fan, a risky endeavor. The subject is powerfully attractive, but the risk of disappointment is huge: few writers have the requisite respect and skill to follow in Austen's footsteps. In Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, Nashville resident Beth Pattillo passes the test with a romance that will appeal to non-Austenites, as well. Pattillo appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 11 at 7 p.m.
Published Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Ole Mess
Charles Eagles charts the courage of James Meredith in integrating Ole Miss
by Clay Risen
Many people believe the major achievements of the civil-rights era came from the federal government: the1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For all the praise we heap on it, too often the civil-right movement is seen as a supporting player, a catalyst, in this historical drama. Charles W. Eagles's definitive new book, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, complicates that narrative. It shows how, over the course of a decade, Mississippi blacks fought and eventually won the right to enter the hallowed institution, even under the benign neglect of successive Washington administrations. Eagles will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on February 11 at 6 p.m.
Published Tuesday, 2 February 2010
History Begins at Home
In The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, John F. Baker Jr. uncovers the story of his own family—and the entire American experiment
by Todd Dills
When Joel F. Baker Jr. launched into what became a three-and-some-decades-long research project on the history of his family on his mother's side, writing a book was most certainly the farthest thing from his thoughts. He was in the seventh grade, after all. But he was driven by a curiosity that never waned in subsequent years—a curiosity that girds the upbeat spirit of The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, a rare hybrid of oral history, traditional chronicle, and memoir. In it Baker brings alive both antebellum and post-bellum life on a quintessentially Middle Tennessee plantation, tightly weaving throughout the quality of urgency that has characterized his life's pursuit.
Published Tuesday, 2 February 2010
A Window into Nashville's Soul
In image and word, Bob Schatz and Christine Kreyling explore Nashville's architectural riches
by Maria Browning
Photographer Bob Schatz and design critic Christine Kreyling combine their talents to create an intimate, surprising portrait of some of Nashville's most beautiful spaces.
Published Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Wordsworth Redux
With Bloodroot, debut novelist Amy Greene brings Romanticism into the 21st century
by Margaret Renkl
Amy Greene has not written a typical debut novel. Instead, she has turned out nothing less than an epic—a story of madness and magic that spans four generations, an emotionally tangled tale that requires six disparate voices to tell and offers no easy resolutions to the conflicts of the heart. To its everlasting credit, Bloodroot is a big, ambitious book that will never be taught in a ninth-grade English class. Amy Greene will read from it at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 8 at 7 p.m., and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on February 9 at 6 p.m.
Published Tuesday, 2 February 2010
One-Term Wonder
Journalist Robert W. Merry considers the expansionist presidency of James K. Polk
by Clay Risen
When James K. Polk, the one-term president from Columbia, Tennessee, took the Oath of Office, the United States was an Atlantic power beset by the British to the north and Spanish and French interests to the south; by the time he left, the country had secured its dominance over North America and set in motion the economic boom that would drive it to global preeminence in the next century. Yet for all the importance of the Polk Administration, the man himself presents historians with a problem: How do you write a compelling narrative about one of America's all-time boring politicians? In his new book, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent, journalist Robert W. Merry gives it a shot.
Published Tuesday, 26 January 2010
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