Q & A

January 16, 2013 Vanderbilt professor Charlotte Pierce-Baker didn’t understand what was happening to her bright, creative son when he first began to behave erratically. As rages, delusions, and substance abuse made his illness obvious, Pierce-Baker and her husband struggled to help him. In This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son, Pierce-Baker recounts the family’s long ordeal and her journey to understanding that “bipolar is forever.” Charlotte Pierce-Baker will read from the book at Vanderbilt University on January 17 at 7 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 126. The event is free and open to the public.

December 17, 2012 Twelve years into a new century, the U.S. is coming to grips with some hard truths: credit is finite, and our houses aren’t ATMs. We are less satisfied with our work, yet we work more and earn less. We are bombarded by advertisements and “news” that often obscures the facts. And our schools are training students for twenty-first-century jobs that may be outsourced overseas anyway. All in all, it’s a bleak picture, but Bill Ivey—writer, teacher, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, principal in Global Cultural Strategies, and trustee of the Center for American Progress—believes we have the tools to create a post-consumerist society. He talks with Chapter 16 about Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy, a new book that outlines his ambitious vision for a new era.

December 14, 2012 In 1946, soon after returning from World War II, Marine lieutenant Christopher S. Donner wrote a memoir that chronicled his experiences as an artillery officer in the Pacific. Lt. Donner served as a Forward Observer in Okinawa, literally under the guns, spotting where the shells hit and calling in adjustments to the battery behind. More than sixty years later, Jack H. McCall, an attorney in Knoxville and a former Army officer, has edited and annotated Donner’s manuscript. Pacific Time on Target is a thoughtful portrait of the Pacific war from the point of view of a junior officer in the thick of things.

December 6, 2012 In a new biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham considers not only Jefferson’s political career but also the ways he operated in both the political and intellectual spheres of the early American republic. In recent years, biographers have cast a more critical light on Jefferson’s career, often focusing on the disconnect between his intellectual ideals and his political behavior. While acknowledging that the third president was far from perfect, Meacham makes the case for seeing Jefferson as a pragmatist rather than a hypocrite. Meacham will discuss Thomas Jefferson at the Nashville Public Library on December 13 at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.