Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Tax Fraud

The Patriot Threat, Steve Berry’s new thriller, ponders what it would mean if the federal income tax had never been properly ratified

By Kathryn Justice Leache | April 15, 2015

April 15, 2015 In The Patriot Threat, Steve Berry’s latest thriller, Cotton Malone searches for evidence that the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been illegal from its inception—and that for more than a hundred years all federal income tax has been collected fraudulently. Berry will appear at the Nashville Public Library on April 22, 2015, at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series.

Running Out of Truth

In What Comes Next and How to Like It, memoirist Abigail Thomas explores betrayal and loss and other parts of life that cannot be understood at a remove

By Beth Waltemath | April 14, 2015

April 14, 2015 What Comes Next and How to Like It, Abigail Thomas’s newest memoir, both exemplifies and transcends its genre as Thomas meditates on what it means to edit life down to essentials: love, forgiveness, pleasure, and letting go. Thomas will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 21, 2015, at 6:30 p.m

L.A. Dark

In Sweet Nothing, mystery writer Richard Lange draws terse poetry from the lives of downtrodden Angelinos

By Ed Tarkington | April 10, 2015

April 10, 2015 Recovering drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, teenage mothers of teenage mothers, alcoholic philanderers—these are Richard Lange’s people. In his new collection, Sweet Nothing, Lange improbably draws elegant poetry and tragic, lingering beauty out of the thwarted, misbegotten denizens of twenty-first century Los Angeles. He will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis at 6:30 p.m. on April 17, 2015.

Shake It Off

In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson peers into the Internet abyss and challenges haters not to hate

By Steve Haruch | April 8, 2015

April 8, 2015Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed examines the consequences—intended and otherwise—of public shaming via the Internet. The book features interviews with otherwise ordinary people made infamous by relatively harmless missteps gone viral. Ronson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 14, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

A Finely Drawn Character

Robert Gipe’s illustrated debut novel, Trampoline, introduces a troubled teen coming of age during an Appalachian coal war

By Michael Ray Taylor | April 7, 2015

April 7, 2015 It’s been a while since anyone produced a great American coming-of-age-novel, but Kingsport native Robert Gipe hits the mark with Trampoline, an inventive debut set in the coal country of Eastern Kentucky. Narrator Dawn Jewell, fifteen, is as smart as Scout Finch, more profane than Holden Caulfield, and as tough in a fight as Mattie Ross. Gipe tells her story not only in flawless prose but also with 220 comics-style drawings that keep the book grounded in the world of an Appalachian teenager.

Pre-Tennessee

A new essay collection edited by Kristopher Ray provides a scholarly look at Tennessee’s origins

By Ralph Bowden | March 26, 2015

March 26, 2014 In Before the Volunteer State, Kristofer Ray has gathered essays from eight scholars that add layers of complexity to the superficial story Tennesseans learn in school. The real story of Tennessee begins much earlier, in the anthropological records left by Native Americans as they adapted to European contacts. Then came the influx of settlers and frontier fortune hunters, and then the wars. The birth of Tennessee was not as simple, painless, or edifying as we may have thought.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher