Book Reviews

Nashville writer Ann Patchett’s second volume of essays, These Precious Days, can be enjoyed as a grab bag of personable pieces depicting her interesting life and times. But everyone who opens the book will also be confronted by serious, universal themes — the abundant gifts of life and the tragedy of its inevitable end. Patchett will discuss the book at a virtual event with novelist Amor Towles on December 7.

The essays in Padgett Powell’s Indigo, his first collection of nonfiction, introduce readers to the bizarre characters and brilliant prose that fans of his fiction have come to expect.

In his latest book, Entertaining Race, Michael Eric Dyson considers the performative aspect of race in American culture and politics. Dyson will discuss Entertaining Race at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 12.

Between Shades of Gray, an award-winning 2011 YA novel by Nashville writer Ruta Sepetys, has been adapted as a stunning graphic novel illustrated by Dave Kopka and a talented support team. The story explores the horrors of Stalin’s gulags as experienced by a young Lithuanian artist deported to Siberia in 1941 with her mother and brother.

Bestselling author and self-described “religious overachiever” Rachel Held Evans describes a way of pursuing God that embraces uncertainty, vulnerability, and compassion in Wholehearted Faith, a posthumous collection of essays, co-authored by Jeff Chu.

In Paper Bullets: Two Women Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, Rhodes College historian Jeffrey H. Jackson has captured one of those stories from the edges of World War II, and the result is a fascinating examination of community and resistance, gender and sexuality, and what it means to recognize the humanity in every person.