Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Murder Memoir

By Michael Ray Taylor

January 4, 2011

January 4, 2011 In the fall of 1979, Bob Cowser Jr. was a nine-year-old baseball enthusiast in a suburb of Martin, Tennessee, when his friend Cary Ann Medlin was abducted, raped, and murdered by a misfit—in the purest, Southern Gothic sense of the word—named Robert Glen Coe. The last time Cowser saw his playmate alive was through the chain link fence of a public swimming pool where he had spent much of his summer. The girl called out his name and asked, “What are you doing here?” In Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, & A Boyhood Between, Cowser, a thoughtful essayist and author of three previous works of creative nonfiction, explores the myriad implications of the question. What is he doing here?

Unbroken

By Anne Delana Reeves

December 30, 2010

December 30, 2010 Composed, the new memoir by Rosanne Cash, could just as easily be titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Whether James Joyce’s novel served as a template (one of Cash’s favorite words) for it, Composed invites comparisons to Joyce’s coming-of-age masterpiece. Written with grace, generosity, and restraint, the memoir chronicles Cash’s struggle to come to terms with her famous musical pedigree while simultaneously creating an enduring artistic legacy of her own, separate but still threaded to the past. The book appears on Publisher’s Weekly‘s list for Best Nonfiction of 2010.

Big Enough to Block Out the Sun

By Ed Tarkington

December 29, 2010

December 29, 2010 At 185 pages, Michael Knight’s new novel, The Typist, could easily be considered a novella or even a long story—unsurprising, given that Knight has earned his greatest acclaim as an author of short stories. But despite its brevity, The Typist encompasses a variety of richly drawn characters, themes, and emotions typically associated with much longer, denser, more ostensibly “ambitious” novels. In this small book, Knight manages to veer through a variety of complications involving love, betrayal, black-market intrigue, and political maneuvering, all set against the backdrop of Japan’s national humiliation during the occupation years following World War II. The book appears on The Huffington Post‘s top-ten list of the best novels of 2010.

In Her Own Right

By Diann Blakely

December 28, 2010

December 28, 2010 Diann Blakely met Eleanor Ross Taylor—poet and widow of Peter Taylor—nearly twenty years ago in Sewanee, Tennessee. For years, until Mrs. Taylor’s age and health began to limit her activity, the two renewed their friendship each summer in Sewanee, writing letters in between. On the publication of Taylor’s Captive Voices, Blakely remembers the poet who gave her the best advice of her life. In 2010, her 91st year, Eleanor Ross Taylor won the Poetry Society’s prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (and $100,000) and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hebrew Lessons

By Paul V. Griffith

December 27, 2010

December 27, 2010 Rummaging through the family deep freeze, fifteen-year-old Bernie Karp finds pork tenderloins and an ancient rabbi frozen in a block of ice. The rabbi’s journey from nineteenth-century Poland to freezer and beyond—and his effect on those he meets—is the stuff of Memphis native Steve Stern’s latest novel, The Frozen Rabbi, a hilarious, poignant romp through the Jewish diaspora to the very firmament itself. The book is on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s list of best books for 2010.

Epic Achievement

By Fernanda Moore

December 24, 2010

December 24, 2010 With King of Ithaka, Tracy Barrett, a senior lecturer in Italian at Vanderbilt University, takes her place in a long line of Odyssey-tweakers. Writers as diverse as the Greek tragedians, James Joyce, and the Coen brothers have helped themselves to what Aeschylus called “slices from the banquet of Homer”—and with varying degrees of success. Barrett’s version turns out to be a wonderfully surprising, thoroughly delightful coming-of-age tale, which has been chosen on of School Library Journal‘s Best Books of 2010.