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.
Memphis writer Richard Bausch has long been known as a master of macho, a chronicler of men. But as his latest story collection, Something Is Out There, demonstrates, Bausch is, if anything, a master of the anti-macho, a writer who digs beneath the tough exterior of his protagonists—male and female alike—to find their fears, weaknesses, and dreams.
To review a book with Jane Austen at its heart is, for a passionate Austen fan, a risky endeavor. The subject is powerfully attractive, but the risk of disappointment is huge: few writers have the requisite respect and skill to follow in Austen’s footsteps. In Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, Nashville resident Beth Pattillo passes the test with a romance that will appeal to non-Austenites, as well. Pattillo appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 11 at 7 p.m.
Many people believe the major achievements of the civil-rights era came from the federal government: the1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For all the praise we heap on it, too often the civil-right movement is seen as a supporting player, a catalyst, in this historical drama. Charles W. Eagles‘s definitive new book, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, complicates that narrative. It shows how, over the course of a decade, Mississippi blacks fought and eventually won the right to enter the hallowed institution, even under the benign neglect of successive Washington administrations. Eagles will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on February 11 at 6 p.m.
