Book Reviews

July 20, 2012 When Joel F. Baker Jr. launched into what became a three-and-some-decades-long research project on the history of his family on his mother’s side, writing a book was most certainly the farthest thing from his thoughts. He was in the seventh grade, after all. But he was driven by a curiosity that never waned in subsequent years—a curiosity that girds the upbeat spirit of The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, a rare hybrid of oral history, traditional chronicle, and memoir. In it Baker brings alive both antebellum and post-bellum life on a quintessentially Middle Tennessee plantation, tightly weaving throughout the quality of urgency that has characterized his life’s pursuit. Baker will discuss The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

July 12, 2012 Vivian Swift, the author of When Wanderers Cease to Roam (2008), abandoned her garden trowel and Adirondack chair, packed her bags, and doodled enough during her honeymoon in France to write a book about the experience. Swift’s ode to travel—and to France, too, though chiefly to travel—includes hundreds of her own watercolor illustrations, notes, and captions, which make the book feel more like an intimate collection of remembrances and a kind of quirky catalog of travel recipes than a straight memoir. “Travel is a lot like sex,” writes Swift. “It’s very personal, prone to fads, and competitive; and we’re all secretly curious how other people do it.” Swift will discuss and sign Le Road Trip at 2 p.m. July 14 at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

July11, 2012 Say the bag you left in your flight’s overhead bin doesn’t contain a relatively inexpensive cell phone but a one-of-a-kind robot head that replicates science-fiction writer Phillip K. Dick. It sounds like a page from one of Dick’s own novels, but it actually happened, says author David F. Dufty, whose How to Build an Android: The True Story of Phillip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection chronicles an attempt to bring the famously paranoid writer back to life as a robot.

July 6, 2012 In Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, editors Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne weave the voices of seventeen very different women into a complex meditation on spiritual beliefs and practices. Together, the essays examine what it means for a woman to question, reject, seek, find, lose, keep, live, and grow into (and out of) her faith over the course of a lifetime. As Reed and Horne explain, “With this book we are hoping to inspire conversation and encourage vulnerability, to challenge memory, to up the volume.” Three Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality contributors—Marilou Awaikta, Susan Cushman, and Beth Ann Fennelly—will read from their essays and sign copies of the collection at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on July 12 at 5 p.m.