A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Book Reviews

Gardening with George (and John, and Thomas, and James)

By Chris Scott

April 14, 2011 In Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, writer and gardening historian Andrea Wulf makes a bold claim—that understanding America’s creation requires knowing the founding fathers as gardeners. While historians may debate her thesis, it is certain that Wulf has wonderfully illuminated an often overlooked and very important aspect of the founders’ lives, providing new reasons to be inspired by them. As part of the Salon@615 series, she will discuss and sign Founding Gardeners in the courtyard of the Nashville Public Library at noon on April 20.

Home is a Long Way From Here

By Liz Garrigan

April 1, 2011 Years ago, when Linda Leaming first saw photos of a friend’s trip to the Himalayan country of Bhutan, wanderlust trumped prudence, and she decided to see this overlooked dot on the map for herself. Once there, she stayed for more than a decade. Married to Bhutan: How One Woman Got Lost, Said “I Do” and Found Bliss is equal parts diary, travel guide, and history lesson—Leaming’s tribute to a culture arguably more evolved than our own. Linda Leaming will sign copies of the book from 5 to 8 p.m. on April 7 at Nashville’s Cumberland Gallery. Artwork by Leaming’s husband, Bhutanese artist Phurba Namgay, will be on display.

The Forgotten Holocaust

By Fernanda Moore

March 21, 2011 In 1939, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of millions of Baltic civilians to forced labor camps. More than twenty million people perished in the gulags, but even those who managed to survive and return home were forbidden to reveal the atrocities they’d suffered in the camps. Nashville author Ruta Sepetys, whose stunning debut novel Between Shades of Gray aims, finally, to tell the long-suppressed truth about Stalin’s mass atrocities, grew up in the culture of silence imposed on camp survivors.

Victoria's Other Secret

By Faye Jones

March 16, 2011 The Victorians were a resourceful group: once they realized how absolutely engrossing readers found crime stories, they invented lady detectives, though the actual gumshoes of the age were uniformly male. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has collected a fascinating group of Victorian stories featuring female detectives and offers an intriguing analysis of these ancestors of Miss Marple. Sims will discuss The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime on March 19 at 1 p.m. at BookMan/BookWoman in Nashville.

Digging Up Evil

By Chris Scott

March 14, 2011 Jefferson Bass (a pseudonym for the writing team of Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass) has mined the unfortunately rich history of true crime to inspire another fictional adventure of Bill Brockton, the alter ego of Bill Bass himself, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist. This time the story is a fictional retelling of the very real, horrific history of a Florida reform school, and The Bone Yard is the darkest outing yet for Brockton and his fellow forensic experts. The Jefferson Bass team will discuss the book at locations in Oak Ridge, Knoxville, Farragut, Athens, and Maryville. Check Chapter 16’s events page, here, for details.

Dissecting Bluff City

By Chris Scott

March 9, 2011 Nashville surgeon A. Scott Pearson has followed up his first medical thriller with a second outing for his alter ego, Dr. Eli Branch. In Public Anatomy, space-age surgical technology meets sixteenth-century medical art in a story of murder and mayhem in Memphis. Pearson will introduce and sign Public Anatomy at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on March 9, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on March 19, and at Mysteries & More in Nashville on March 26.

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