A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Book Reviews

In Her Own Right

By Diann Blakely

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 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 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.

Christmas with the Nitwitts

By Faye Jones

December 14, 2010 After a day of fighting mall crowds in search of this year’s must-have gizmo, there may be no better holiday treat than settling down with a cup of coffee and a Santa cookie and spending a few hours in Second Creek, Mississippi, with Robert Dalby’s A Piggly Wiggly Christmas. Dalby will read from and sign copies of the book this week at public libraries in Crossville, Murfreesboro, Collierville, and Clarksville. Check Chapter 16’s events section for details.

Bird Fever

By Michael Ray Taylor

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.”

Memphis Soul Stew

By Paul V. Griffith

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.

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