Book Reviews

When Paul Matthew Turner left his home in Virginia to attend Nashville’s Belmont University, he didn’t know what he was in for. Compared to his fundamentalist childhood, Belmont was a devil’s playground where plaid-shirted hipsters smoked clove cigarettes and listened to Amy Grant. Like a spiritual version of High Fidelity, Hear No Evil describes the way music helped Turner come to terms with this more-worldly version of the Christian faith. With a sly sense of humor and a mid-nineties soundtrack playing in his head, Turner discovers that Christianity is less a series of proscriptions than it is a way of living in a sometimes far-from-perfect world.

The first tax created by the young United States government, writes journalist Max Watman, was levied against whiskey, creating a subculture of illegal spirits that grew with the nation and continues to thrive. In Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine, Watman comically explores the history and current practices of this (mainly Southern) subculture. In the spirit of submersion journalism, he not only researches this subject but also joins in the subculture, employing a succession of home-built stills. Despite a few missteps, both spirituous and literary, Watman ultimately serves up a palatable concoction, with a satisfying—and thoroughly illicit—burn.

Photographer Michael Loyd Young has documented cultural practices around the world, but in Blues, Booze & BBQ he turns his camera on a community a little closer to home, capturing the raucous, passionate culture of the Delta blues in more than seventy photographs of musicians, audiences, music festivals, juke joints—and, yes, barbecue.

Epidemics of encephalitis lethargica—sleeping sickness—have long inspired literature, writes Memphis-based science author Molly Caldwell Crosby in Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains one of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries. “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are but three well-known stories written after separate outbreaks of the mysterious illness, which can cause patients to sleep for months or years, if they ever awaken at all. In Asleep, Crosby, author of the 2006 nonfiction bestseller The American Plague, has written a tale as timeless and disturbing as its fictional predecessors. Crosby will read from and sign copies of Asleep at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on March 2, and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on March 16.

Among the technological firsts of the American Civil War was an odd little boat, built by a group of dedicated entrepreneurs, that heralded the age of underwater exploration and warfare. In The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy, Knoxville historian Tom Chaffin details the remarkable story of the first submarine to sink an enemy ship.