Book Reviews

March 7, 2013 Becca Stevens, chaplain at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville, has spent the better part of her adult life trying to help women broken by rape, forced prostitution, homelessness, addiction, and other physical and emotional trauma. In her new memoir—equal parts journal, spiritual guide, and history lesson—Stevens details her own sexual abuse and healing and how her ministry has led to the founding of Thistle Farms, a cottage enterprise run by women in the process of healing themselves. As part of the Salon@615 series, Becca Stevens will discuss and sign Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling on March 12 at 6:15 p.m. Doors open at 5:45, and the event is free.

March 5, 2013 Drawing on an impressive collection of sources, Memphis librarian Patrick O’Daniel has documented every aspect of the disastrous Mississippi Valley flood of 1927. His new book, When the Levee Breaks, is a condensed encyclopedia covering where the water came from, where the levees broke, who died, who was rescued, and who responded. Memphis, which mostly escaped the devastation, became the main response center for recovery, and O’Daniel uses the flood as a vehicle for examining the Mississippi Valley’s agricultural and economic condition in 1927, the pervasive racism of the time, and the politics involved in rebuilding. Patrick O’Daniel will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on March 9 at 2 p.m.

February 25, 2013 As bestselling author Evan Thomas recounts in Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, the thirty-fourth president was a master at both reading people and playing the odds, abilities that served him well whether at the bridge table or the negotiating table. Thomas argues that Ike bluffed his way through eight years of confrontation with the Russians and Chinese, preventing a war that he believed would leave civilization a smoldering heap. Thomas will appear with Jon Meacham to discuss Ike’s Bluff at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on February 28, as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

February 14, 2013 The American fascination with technology began in the late nineteenth century with the development of electric light. Many researchers and experimenters were involved in the discovery, though credit usually goes to Thomas Edison because he successfully commercialized his model of the incandescent bulb. As University of Tennessee historian Ernest Freeberg notes in a new book, the effect of adequate illumination—on work, entertainment, family life, safety, medicine, social class, architecture, business, and industry—was enormous. The Age of Edison is a social history of America from about 1880 to 1935, as illuminated by electric light. Freeberg will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 21 at 6 p.m.