Fight like hell and then forgive, but don’t forget
Everyone in my family played something. Dad loved word games, dice games, and pool. Mom was a fierce competitor at Monopoly, rummy, and double solitaire, during which, in her motherly way, she would trash talk her offspring to gain psychological advantage.
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Susan Orlean shows us ourselves in stories about furry and feathered companions
The four-legged and two-winged subjects in Susan Orlean’s essay collection On Animals include the wild and domestic, the friend and the servant. But really, it’s more about the people. She will be appearing at a virtual event with Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett in the Salon@615 series on October 20.
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Erika Engelhaupt finds the joy of science in the gross stuff
Knoxvillian Erika Engelhaupt’s Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science is a lighthearted but serious examination of the gross, the grisly, and the grimy. She will discuss the book in a virtual event hosted by Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on March 30.
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A ponderous great book becomes a portal to the past
That first edition of The Random House Unabridged contains about 300,000 entries. In all, 2,091 thumb-indexed pages. All of this seemed like most of the world’s knowledge to a young me, and flipping through it while lying on the short-napped, striped carpet was, if not my favorite pastime, at least a worthwhile one.
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Ernest Freeberg tells how animal rights became part of the 19th-century reform movement
In A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement, award-winning historian Ernest Freeberg tells the story of the founding father of the ASPCA and how Americans rallied to alleviate the needless suffering of animals.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham examines the last words of Jesus
In The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross, historian Jon Meacham offers a series of devotional essays inspired by his own faith.
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