Book Reviews

December 13, 2010 “Since the early 1900s, one question and one question alone has swirled around the largest woodpecker to live in our part of the world,” Knoxville naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales writes in his prologue to Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941. “Is it alive or dead? …. Ivory-bills have attained mythical status because they represent all that is wild and unobtainable and resilient in our natural world.”

December 8, 2010 Memphis likes things a little hotter and a little spicier than Nashville, its sister city to the east. You hear it in the music and you taste it in the food: two things Memphians take very seriously. It’s only right, then, that the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission would publish a cookbook, A Taste of Memphis Music—and it’s only right that its contents would come from Memphis’s legendary music community. In recipes as varied and soulful as the Memphis Sound itself, A Taste of Memphis Music takes would-be chefs down Beale Street, across Main, and into the heart of one of the South’s great food cities.

December 7, 2010 “Nashville has always been a magnet for dreamers, iconoclasts, poets, pickers, and prophets from all over,” the singer/songwriter Marshall Chapman writes in the prologue to her new book, They Came to Nashville, a collection of interviews with noteworthy musicians about their earliest days in Music City. In the book, Chapman sits down to chat with fifteen old chums and close acquaintances, including many who have shared a stage with her.

December 26, 2010 What is the South, and who owns its memory? At the core of the question, renewed in Michael Kreyling’s The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History, is the conflict between an idealized cultural “memory” of the South as it appears in the iconic Gone With the Wind, and the grim, brutal realities of Southern history that haunt the characters of Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterpiece, Beloved.

December 2, 2010 In The Last Good War: The Faces and Voices of World War II, photographer Thomas Sanders created images of American veterans spanning all walks of life and service branches. Journalist and native Nashvillian Veronica Kevass interviewed the veterans, as well, letting them tell their stories in their own words. The resulting book is a loving thank-you note to the millions who saved the world.