Presidents Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, all played roles in the tale Clay Risen tells in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Risen, a Nashville native and editor for The New York Times, takes a fresh look at the dark side of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers and lives with accusations of communism.
The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter, an essay anthology edited by Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard, surveys Carter’s large body of writing and considers what it reveals about the man from Plains, Georgia.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The historical figures at the center of Set the World on Fire by Keisha Blain are outside the halls of power: They are Black, they are women, they are poor or working-class, and they advocate ideas that fall outside the political mainstream.
Chantha Nguon’s Slow Noodles chronicles her life growing up in Cambodia and her family’s flight to Vietnam to escape persecution under Lon Nol, before Year Zero and the terror of the Khmer Rouge. The book also describes the comfort of the delicious food made by Nguon’s mother, her sister, and later, by her. Nguon invites readers to understand Cambodian culture through both the pain of the past and the delicious flavors that fed hope for the future. Nguon, along with her daughter Clara Kim and co-author Kim Green, talked with Chapter 16 about how the memoir came to be.
Ex-CIA operative Court Gentry’s most personal adventure explodes into bookstores this month with Midnight Black, the 14th book in the Gray Man series from Memphis author Mark Greaney. He’ll appear at Novel in Memphis on February 22.
In Our Secret Society, Tanisha Ford plumbs the inner workings of the Civil Rights Movement through the complicated life of a dazzling socialite named Mollie Moon. Ford will discuss Our Secret Society at the University of Memphis on February 5.
