Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Playing for Keeps

In a new book, Evan Thomas praises the gamesmanship of Dwight Eisenhower

By Chris Scott | February 25, 2013

February 25, 2013 As bestselling author Evan Thomas recounts in Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, the thirty-fourth president was a master at both reading people and playing the odds, abilities that served him well whether at the bridge table or the negotiating table. Thomas argues that Ike bluffed his way through eight years of confrontation with the Russians and Chinese, preventing a war that he believed would leave civilization a smoldering heap. Thomas will appear with Jon Meacham to discuss Ike’s Bluff at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on February 28, as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

Social History, Illuminated

Historian Ernest Freeberg looks at the sometimes surprising ramifications of electric lighting

By Ralph Bowden | February 14, 2013

February 14, 2013 The American fascination with technology began in the late nineteenth century with the development of electric light. Many researchers and experimenters were involved in the discovery, though credit usually goes to Thomas Edison because he successfully commercialized his model of the incandescent bulb. As University of Tennessee historian Ernest Freeberg notes in a new book, the effect of adequate illumination—on work, entertainment, family life, safety, medicine, social class, architecture, business, and industry—was enormous. The Age of Edison is a social history of America from about 1880 to 1935, as illuminated by electric light. Freeberg will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 21 at 6 p.m.

A Feisty First

Jenny Milchman’s intricately woven thriller is a daring and worthy debut

By Liz Garrigan | February 13, 2013

February 13, 2013 Jenny Milchman’s debut novel, Cover of Snow, is memorable and affecting, and it avoids all signs of banality, that great danger for genre fiction in general and new authors in particular. There’s a good reason the characters feel three-dimensional: though Cover of Snow is Milchman’s first published novel, it is in fact the eighth she’s written, and the eleven years she spent honing her skills are evident in this intricately woven thriller. Milchman will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on February 16 at 2 p.m.

Stepping Into the Mouth of the Devil

In Wash, her debut novel, Margaret Wrinkle explores the horrors of slave breeding in antebellum Tennessee

By Ed Tarkington | February 7, 2013

February 7, 2013 Margaret Wrinkle has some very ambitious aims in her debut novel, Wash: to explore and reconcile the contradictions and conflicts of the relationship between owner and owned in the antebellum South, a feat she manages by opening a window onto the infamous practice of slave breeding. Margaret Wrinkle will discuss and sign Wash at Parnassus Books on February 16 at 2 p.m.

Decisions and Destiny

A new YA novel by Ruta Sepetys, bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray, tells a story of vice and victory in the Big Easy

By Tina LoTufo | February 6, 2013

February 6, 2013 “My mother’s a prostitute,” observes seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine. “She’s actually quite pretty, fairly well spoken, and has lovely clothes. But she sleeps with men for money or gifts, and according to the dictionary, that makes her a prostitute.” Thus begins Out of the Easy, the new young-adult novel from bestselling Nashville author Ruta Sepetys. As Josie fights her way to self-knowledge and a better future, one small victory at a time, Out of the Easy will remind readers of classic coming-of-age stories like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Sepetys will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on February 13 at 6 p.m.

British Invasions, Successful and Not

Dewey Lambdin takes his popular high-seas hero, Captain Alan Lewrie, to the South Atlantic

By Ralph Bowden | February 5, 2013

February 5, 2013 Thanks to slow and unreliable communications between the admiralty and ships at sea, naval officers such as fictional hero Captain Alan Lewrie could often exercise considerable independence once out of port. In Hostile Shores, Dewey Lambin’s nineteenth Alan Lewrie adventure, however, Lewrie’s frigate, Reliant, is under the close command of a half-baked commodore with dreams of grandeur. Lewrie nevertheless finds ways to maneuver, sometimes stepping on toes or taking considerable risks. His adventures here, as always, are rollicking good yarns, with authentic details and characters, a hero, his ship, and lots of excitement.

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning