Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Saint Pioneer Feminist

Journalist Bill Briggs traces the canonization of an unlikely miracle worker

By Anne Delana Reeves | January 31, 2011

January 31, 2011 Former Nashville Banner reporter Bill Briggs, now a journalist with MSNBC.com, has written a masterful page-turner, a book that serves as a testament to tenacious research, graceful prose, and a true journalist’s skeptical nature. By following the beatification of Mother Théodore, a nineteenth-century American nun, The Third Miracle: An Ordinary Man, a Medical Mystery, and a Trial of Faith uncovers the secret saint-making practices of the Catholic Church. Ultimately, of course, it is a story about the age-old conflict between faith and science. Briggs will discuss the book at the offices of McNeely Piggott & Fox, in Nashville, on February 1 at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Fairy-Tale Frolic

Jennifer Trafton debuts with a charming tale for young readers

By Lyda Phillips | January 25, 2011

January 25, 2011 In The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton creates a delightful fairy-tale world. This beautifully illustrated novel introduces a land inhabited by very serious Leafeaters; overly hilarious Rumblebumps; a spoiled young king who loves pepper and is saved by the love of a cat; Worvil the Worrier, whose imagination paralyzes him; and especially Persimmony Smudge, an irrepressible and courageous heroine. The inhabitants call their home “The Island at the Center of Everything,” but as it turns out, it’s a sleeping giant who’s really at the center of everything. Trafton will read from and sign copies of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic at Cover To Cover Bookstore in Arlington on Jan. 27 at 5 p.m.

A Disturbing Sweetness

Poet Diann Blakely looks at the work of legendary Memphis photographer William Eggleston

By Diann Blakely | January 20, 2011

January 20, 2011 One of the most striking images in Michael Almereyda’s documentary film, William Eggleston in the Real World, also appears on the cover of the new Eggleston collection, For Now: Eggleston’s wife, Rosa, lies sleeping with a yellow-flowered duvet bunched across her middle, one slender, aristocratic hand holding the sheets in place near the pubic region. Has the couple just had sex? Rosa’s lovely long legs end in feet that appear slightly dirty; the room is small, dingy, and low-ceilinged. The gaping closet door has a pink, pocketed storage container hanging over the top, and a plastic, brown-nippled baby bottle sits on top of a staticky television. Remember when TV used to go “off the air” at night? There’s something yellow and disturbing about the portrait.

Going Native

In a collection of stories, Sybil Baker describes one woman’s search for connection

By Paul V. Griffith | January 18, 2011

January 18, 2011 Talismans is a series of short stories that, not unlike photos in an album, work together to tell a larger tale. Written by Sybil Baker, an English professor at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, these brief snapshots center on Elise, the daughter of a church organist and a Vietnam vet, whose early suburban life is a quagmire of sexual experimentation and social unease. Eventually, Elise drifts to Southeast Asia, where she searches for a connection: to her late father, her lovers, her fellow travelers, and eventually to the local culture and the land itself.

The Truth About the Feechiefolk Freak

Jonathan Rogers’s new YA novel reads like a well-loved folk tale

By Lacey Galbraith | January 11, 2011

January 11, 2011 The protagonist in Jonathan Rogers’s latest young-adult novel, The Charlatan’s Boy, is Grady, a twelve-year-old orphan who doesn’t “have any idea who I was or where I come from.” He doesn’t even have a last name. For much of his life, Grady has traveled from village to village alongside “full-bloomed scoundrel” Floyd Wendellson. Together they put on a circus-freak-show performance, with Floyd as the showman ringmaster and Grady “The Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp.” Dressed in “muskrat and possum hides,” his face covered in mud, Grady pretends to be one of the Feechiefolk, a mythical group of people who live in the swampy “black waters of the Feechiefen.”

Crowned with Laurel

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt’s new anthology of work by America’s poets laureate is a treasure

By Fernanda Moore | January 10, 2011

January 10, 2011 As Howard Nemerov once quipped, America’s poet laureate would do well “to devote his tenure to explaining to others what exactly it is that the poet laureate does.” Fortunately for future laureates, The Poets Laureate Anthology, brilliantly edited by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, clarifies the role of the nation’s poet on retainer and simultaneously provides examples of the best work of poets tapped for the job.

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher