Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Digging Up Evil

By Chris Scott

March 14, 2011

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

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.

Dating the Big Bang

By Michael Ray Taylor

March 3, 2011

March 3, 2011 In How Old is the Universe?, David A. Weintraub, a professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt, gives a very readable history of astronomy, explaining how each milestone discovery—starting with those of the ancient Greeks—placed mankind closer to fixing the moment it all began. Weintraub will discuss How Old is the Universe? at the Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory on March 8 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 each or $10 per family.

Hot Blooded

By Michael Ray Taylor

March 1, 2011

March 1, 2011 In her fascinating new history, Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution, Vanderbilt associate professor Holly Tucker brings to life the highly charged and sometimes dangerously ignorant world of research that gave birth to what we now regard as “scientific method.” Tucker will discuss and sign copies of Blood Work on March 2 at 11:30 a.m. in the main Nashville Public Library. The event is part of the Thinking Out of the (Lunch) Box series, a joint venture of Vanderbilt University and the Nashville Public Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Book Excerpt: Madison Smartt Bell's The Color of Night

By Madison Smartt Bell

February 21, 2011

February 21, 2011 In his new novel, The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers into the mind of Mae, a woman who has channeled the incestuous abuse of her childhood into a mystical, eroticized obsession with violence and death. Televised images of the 9/11 attacks thrill her, spurring memories of a sojourn with a Manson-like cult and of a woman, Laurel, who was her lover and ally there. What follows is an excerpt from the book, which hits shelves April 5.

A Matter of Black and White?

By Paul V. Griffith

February 17, 2011

February 17, 2011 For years racial identity in America was enforced by strict laws and social mores. Such dicta told people whom they could marry, how they could do business, and, for the first century of the nation’s existence, who owned whom. But no matter how rigid things looked on paper, on the ground it was a different story. In The Invisible Line, Daniel Sharfstein follows three families from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era, showing how each managed to manipulate racial restrictions and live and thrive in the very communities that might have shut them out. No mere recounting of events, The Invisible Line’s taut narratives show that race in America is a far more complex affair than many history books would have us believe. Daniel Sharfstein will discuss The Invisible Line at 7 p.m. on February 22 at Borders Books in Nashville.