Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Ambassador to Hell

By Maria Browning

February 6, 2012

February 6, 2012 David Scheffer served as the first-ever U.S. ambassador-at-large for war-crimes issues, an office sometimes referred to by his colleagues as “Ambassador to Hell.” In All the Missing Souls, Scheffer gives a firsthand account of the political and diplomatic struggle to form international courts of justice for what he calls “atrocity crimes,” and provides vivid accounts of his own encounters with the survivors of unimaginable brutality. David Scheffer will discuss All the Missing Souls in Nashville at noon on February 7 in the Flynn Auditorium of the Vanderbilt University Law School. The event is free and open to the public.

Ecstasy and Perversion

By Ed Tarkington

February 1, 2012

February 1, 2012 In her new collection, Tales of the New World, Sabina Murray imagines the minds and hearts of a broad variety of legendary explorers and adventurers, investigating the complex and problematic nature of the urge “to go where no man has gone before.” In prose that is at once fearlessly blunt and stylishly ethereal, Murray recreates the triumphs and tragedies of a cast ranging from Ferdinand Magellan to cult leader Jim Jones. Murray will read from and discuss her work on February 6 at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Holy War, Popular War

By Paul V. Griffith

January 31, 2012

January 31, 2012 Of all the sayings about history––it’s one damned thing after another; it’s written by the winners, it’s doomed to repeat itself––none is more incriminating than the one attributed to Lenin: A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. Knoxville historian Jay Rubenstein takes this phenomenon into account in Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse.

A Complex Creation

By Maria Browning

January 30, 2012

January 30, 2012 Science and faith seem to be continually at war in American culture, with both sides claiming exclusive hold on the truth. In Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, Memphis native Alan Lightman seeks to reconcile the two, respecting both reasoned inquiry and spiritual mystery.

Every Picture Tells a Story

By Tina LoTufo

January 10, 2012

January 10, 2012 The publication of the first edition of Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History in 2001 was met with great appreciation among fans of mid-century comic books and comic-book artists. In the second edition, William B. Jones Jr. has incuded more than a hundred additional pages of historical facts, interviews, photos, and illustrations from the original comics, including full-color plates of iconic covers in the series. Jones calls them “as much a part of growing up in postwar America as baseball cards, hula hoops, Barbie dolls, or rock ‘n’ roll.”

The Triumph of Rationality

By Tina LoTufo

January 4, 2012

January 4, 2012 Michael Sims’s new collection of Victorian detective stories, The Dead Witness, is a cornucopia of dastardly delights and surprises. Watching the characters patiently unravel knots and ingeniously solve puzzles provides the delight. The surprises are the depth and breadth of variety represented in Sims’s overview of the genre. Humor and pathos, moralism and mercy, parody and tragedy, horror and retribution—the full spectrum of the human psyche is on display in this collection. The international cast of characters features authors and protagonists alike from England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. They include a mild-mannered Catholic priest and a tough-talking Virginian, a folksy Canadian tracker and a wide-eyed teenaged boy, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, a blind man, a Musketeer, a bumbler, a dilettante, and, of course, that curiously observant Englishman with a penchant for violins and opium.