Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Much More than Tea and Sympathy

In The Way of Tea and Justice, Becca Stevens tells the story behind Nashville’s Thistle Stop Café, a cottage industry for former prostitutes

By Tina LoTufo | November 20, 2014

November 20, 2014 “A Story in Every Cup”—that’s the motto of Nashville’s Thistle Stop Café. In The Way of Tea and Justice, Becca Stevens, Episcopal priest and founder of Thistle Farms, tells the story of the Thistle Stop Café, where, in Stevens’ words, “we recognize the dignity of each person” while providing additional employment opportunities for former prostitutes in recovery.

Sophisticated Tales, Hardscrabble Lives

The stories in David Madden’s The Last Bizarre Tale reveal hidden hopes in the South’s dark corners

By Sean Kinch | November 19, 2014

November 19, 2014 The stories in The Last Bizarre Tale, a new collection by Knoxville native David Madden, exhibit the protean nature of Madden’s gifts: his masterful tales run the gamut of literary styles and genres, each entry marked with the stamp of its author’s ingenuity. Madden will appear at Knox Heritage in Knoxville on November 21, 2014, at 11:30 a.m.

A Lover’s Quest

Brandy Wilson’s The Palace Blues tells a story of a Prohibition-era lesbian romance

By Maria Browning | November 18, 2014

November 18, 2014 Frankie, the young heroine of Brandy Wilson’s Prohibition-era novel, The Palace Blues, comes from respectable folks who expect her to marry a nice boy, but she has no interest in respectability, and she’d rather pass for a boy than marry one. When she falls in love with Jean Bailey, a beautiful blues singer, she begins a journey that leaves her family and respectability far behind.

Tossing a Firecracker into Journalism

Curtis Wilkie is much more than a political reporter or a Southern colorist

By Clay Risen | November 14, 2014

November 14, 2014 It’s tempting to close Curtis Wilkie’s new collection, Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians and Other People of Interest, reach for a bottle of bourbon, and sigh about how they don’t make journalists like they used to. Wilkie will discuss and sign copies at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on November 21, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

Scared and Ashamed and Full of Hope

In The Heaven of Animals, David James Poissant limns the lives of the thwarted

By Ed Tarkington | November 13, 2014

November 13, 2014 David James Poissant’s delicately crafted stories of human longing and loss have earned him comparisons to Richard Ford and Anton Chekhov. In his debut collection, The Heaven of Animals, Poissant paints a broad canvas populated by a memorable cast of hard-luck cases. He will appear at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library in Knoxville on November 17, 2014, at 7 p.m.

Alone in the Locker Room, Bleeding

Andrew Maraniss’s Strong Inside is a superb biography of SEC basketball pioneer Perry Wallace

By Clay Risen | November 12, 2014

November 12, 2014 Like any great biography, Andrew Maraniss’s Strong Inside concerns more than just its subject. It is also a history of Vanderbilt, of Nashville, of the SEC; a history of basketball and Southern sports culture and how they clashed with the civil-rights movement. Above all it is a meditation on the personal price of progress, about what happens to the people we ask to be racial pioneers, and what we—as whites, as blacks—owe them in return. Maraniss will discuss Strong Inside at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. The discussion will be moderated by Mayor Karl Dean.

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher