Tough Stuff
Paul Burch gets in the head of country music legend Jimmie Rodgers in his novel Meridian Rising. Burch will appear at Memphis Listening Lab on October 8 and the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
Saving the Colonel from the Mythmakers
Facts tend to lose the battle with myths, but Peter Guralnick keeps fighting the good fight for the truth in The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World. Guralnick will discuss the book at Graceland in Memphis on August 15 and Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 20.
Revisiting a Witch Hunt
Presidents Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, all played roles in the tale Clay Risen tells in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Risen, a Nashville native and editor for The New York Times, takes a fresh look at the dark side of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers and lives with accusations of communism.
An American Original
Jeff Apter’s Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly tells the story of a legitimate rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, as influential as his more celebrated peers at Sun Records like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash.
The State of the Workers
Alice Driver’s Life and Death of the American Worker tells the stories of the men and women who labor for a food industry giant. Driver will appear at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.
A Connection to the Earth
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Family farming is hard work, acknowledges Brooks Lamb in Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place. In this 2023 Chapter 16 interview, he says it’s also a rewarding lifestyle worth saving, for the sake of the environment and ourselves. Lamb will discuss Love for the Land at Patagonia Nashville on May 16.
