A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Gender Bender

January 15, 2013 “I’m not quite one of those ‘born in the wrong body’ types you see on Oprah or The Learning Channel,” T Cooper writes. “I actually think I was born in the right body. It’s just a little different, and it doesn’t fit squarely into the gender binary.” Cooper will read from and discuss his new memoir, Real Man Adventures, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 17 at 6:30 p.m. On March 11, Cooper will also read at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library. Both events are free and open to the public.

A House of God, Divided

January 14, 2013 Any good history of desegregation highlights the unique circumstances of a particular incident without losing sight of the general social transformation it was a part of. Rhodes College professor Stephen R. Haynes has managed to do exactly that in his new book, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation, which provides a thorough and engaging overview of the struggle to integrate the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis. Haynes will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 22 at 6 p.m.

Renaissance Intrigue

January 10, 2013 In Alana White’s debut novel, The Sign of the Weeping Virgin, Guid’Antonio Vespucci and his nephew Amerigo return from a two-year diplomatic mission to Paris only to find their native Florence in disarray. A young woman has been kidnapped, supposedly by the infidel Turks, and a painting of the Virgin Mary is weeping in the Vespucci home church. In fifteenth-century Italy, these events are equally disturbing. Many in Florence believe the Virgin is weeping over Lorenzo Medici’s long argument with Pope Sixtus IV. Rebellion and mutiny are in the air.

Death in Murfreesboro

January 9, 2013 Historian Larry J. Daniel believes it is time to set the record straight about one of the turning points of the Civil War. In Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland, Daniel details a fight that is counted as one of the ten costliest battles of the war and that firmly established Union control in Tennessee.

YA Central?

December 19, 2012 This fall, four Nashville authors are no doubt hoping their new books will ride the current wave of YA popularity among adults as well as teens. Sci-fi author Myra McEntire’s Timepiece is the second installment of her “Hourglass” time-travel trilogy. In What’s Left of Me, debut novelist (and Vanderbilt undergraduate) Kat Zhang imagines an alternate reality in which “hybrid” humans suffer persecution. C. J. Redwine’s Defiance introduces fantasy-lovers to a land of dangerous creatures and bloody tyranny. And Kathryn Williams turns to the kitchen and the world of reality shows with the delightful Pizza, Love, and Other Stuff That Made Me Famous.

A Massive Whitewash

December 11, 2012 “The Nashville Way” is a phrase coined in the 1960s to describe the more civilized manner in which the white establishment of Nashville behaved when confronted with demands of equality from the black people of Nashville than did, say, the white establishment of Birmingham. But in his new book, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City, historian Benjamin Houston concludes that the slogan was nothing more than “a massive whitewash on multiple levels,” and he tells why in narratives from the perspective of both the white establishment and the leadership of the black community. On the whole, he writes, “it is the story of a society wrestling with yet willfully ignoring its racial reality. More fundamentally it is the story of how a racial status quo, after decades of upheaval, was both changed and yet preserved.”

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