April 23, 2012 If any singer/songwriter nailed the deep pain and loneliness in the American heart, it’s Hank Williams. He also personified another American artistic tradition: live hard and die young. In Hank Hung the Moon … and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts, former Memphis writer Rheta Grimsley Johnson pays tribute to the artist who wrote the soundtrack of her life.
April 16, 2012 For most readers, a title like A Titanic Love Story will immediately bring to mind the image of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embracing to a sound track by Celine Dion. These fictional characters may embody doomed shipboard love today, but at the time of the Titanic’s actual sinking, the public was gripped by a real-life love story that is now mostly forgotten: Ida Straus refused to leave Isidor, her husband of more than forty years, to take her place in a lifeboat, while he refused to leave the ship until all the women and children on board were safe. In A Titanic Love Story, Murfreesboro’s June Hall McCash writes their joint biography.
April 11, 2012 In his new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (written with New York Daily News sportswriter Wayne Coffey), R.A. Dickey recounts his struggles to make it in the major leagues, achieving real success only after he transformed himself from a conventional pitcher into a knuckleballer. Dickey parallels that story with his real subject: how finally confronting the trauma of being sexually molested as a child freed him from self-centeredness and shame. For Dickey, mastering the knuckleball went hand-in-hand with mastering his own demons. Dickey will discuss the book on April 12 at Franklin’s LifeWay Christian Store at 4 p.m. and at Nashville’s Books-A-Million at 7:30 p.m.
April 10, 2012 Madeline Miller’s debut novel, The Song of Achilles, aims to uncover the passionate love story hidden inside the greatest war epic in Western literature. The romantic leads are Achilles, the Greek war-hero par excellence, and Patroclus, his tent mate and best friend. Whether the men were actually lovers or simply “boon companions” has been up for debate since Homer first composed his epic saga of the Trojan War, but the love story Miller tells is glorious, and the context in which it plays out is faithful to the original. Miller will discuss The Song of Achilles at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17 at 6:30 p.m.
April 5, 2012 While a major home-renovation project would keep most people busy, Miss Julia finds time to run to West Virginia to break a man out of the hospital and crash a snake-handling worship service. But in this thirteenth outing for Ann B. Ross’s popular heroine, things aren’t much quieter back home, where she must battle some New Age cultists for the body and soul of her carpenter. Ann B. Ross will discuss Miss Julia to the Rescue at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 9 at 6 p.m., at Books-A-Million in Nashville on April 10 at 7 p.m., and at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 14 at 1 p.m.
April 4, 2012 R.J. Smith can’t be accused of objectivity—his abject adoration of James Brown seeps onto nearly every page—but his acclaimed new bio of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business is exhaustively researched and makes a square accounting of Brown’s triumphs, humiliations, and criminal excesses. R.J. Smith will discuss The One: The Life and Music of James Brown in Nashville at Parnassus Books on April 5 at 6:30 p.m., and at Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center on April 6 at 9 a.m. Both events are free and open to the public, but the Vanderbilt event requires a reservation. Email heather.lefkowitz@vanderbilt.edu for admission.
