Book Reviews

July 12, 2012 Vivian Swift, the author of When Wanderers Cease to Roam (2008), abandoned her garden trowel and Adirondack chair, packed her bags, and doodled enough during her honeymoon in France to write a book about the experience. Swift’s ode to travel—and to France, too, though chiefly to travel—includes hundreds of her own watercolor illustrations, notes, and captions, which make the book feel more like an intimate collection of remembrances and a kind of quirky catalog of travel recipes than a straight memoir. “Travel is a lot like sex,” writes Swift. “It’s very personal, prone to fads, and competitive; and we’re all secretly curious how other people do it.” Swift will discuss and sign Le Road Trip at 2 p.m. July 14 at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

July11, 2012 Say the bag you left in your flight’s overhead bin doesn’t contain a relatively inexpensive cell phone but a one-of-a-kind robot head that replicates science-fiction writer Phillip K. Dick. It sounds like a page from one of Dick’s own novels, but it actually happened, says author David F. Dufty, whose How to Build an Android: The True Story of Phillip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection chronicles an attempt to bring the famously paranoid writer back to life as a robot.

July 6, 2012 In Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, editors Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne weave the voices of seventeen very different women into a complex meditation on spiritual beliefs and practices. Together, the essays examine what it means for a woman to question, reject, seek, find, lose, keep, live, and grow into (and out of) her faith over the course of a lifetime. As Reed and Horne explain, “With this book we are hoping to inspire conversation and encourage vulnerability, to challenge memory, to up the volume.” Three Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality contributors—Marilou Awaikta, Susan Cushman, and Beth Ann Fennelly—will read from their essays and sign copies of the collection at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on July 12 at 5 p.m.

June 25, 2012 “My childhood has been shadowed by two enormous fears: my father’s alcoholism and Rocky Flats,” writes Kristen Iversen, director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Memphis. With honesty and dignity, Iversen explains how her increasingly troubled father and ineffectual mother created a fragile home life that depended on silence and secrets—an atmosphere not unlike that of the mismanaged and deadly dangerous nuclear-weapons facility at Rocky Flats, located near their suburban Colorado home. In Full Body Burden, Iversen illuminates the beauty of her childhood memories, but she does not flinch from uncovering the damage simultaneously inflicted upon her and her family, upon the land, and ultimately upon us all.

June 22, 2012 In Dust to Dust, Benjamin Busch recounts his life through a series of meditations on the physical world. This unorthodox memoir, which concerns itself quite literally with the stuff of a life, puts the reader in touch with the elemental struggle we all share. Busch will discuss and sign Dust to Dust at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on June 24 at 3 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 11 at 6:30 p.m.