Book Reviews

In a tour-de-force of popular history, America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story, author Bruce Feiler has contributed a genuinely new idea, proposing that the ancient tale of a Hebrew prophet forms a key narrative underlying the ongoing experiment that is the United States. According to Feiler, this narrative has had a profound impact on individuals, movements, and even the founding of the republic itself. America’s Prophet is a book about the power of a story to inspire a people who are always searching for the path to freedom.

A group of earnest and thoughtful Nashville students became leaders in one of history’s most impressive—and successful—mass movements, as they threw their bodies, their very lives, on the line to end segregation in the South. The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation, by Andrew B. Lewis,, is a new look at this era, examining it through the lens of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its leaders—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry, Bob Zellner, and Julian Bond.

D’Army Bailey has embraced many roles in public life. He’s been an activist, a politician, and a distinguished jurist, serving on the Circuit Court bench in Memphis since 1990. He was instrumental in the founding of the National Civil Rights Museum, and he’s also done a few turns as an actor, appearing in films like How Stella Got Her Groove Back and The People v. Larry Flynt. No doubt he has many stories to tell, but in The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist’s Journey 1959-1964, he confines his memoir to one narrow segment of history: his college years, when he evolved from a very bright, conventional young man to a civil-rights firebrand who was expelled from his all-black school for leading student protests.

In the day, country music characters like Grandpa Jones, Mel Tillis, and George Jones left a wake of hilarious, poignant, and bawdy tales that Music Row insiders passed around like baseball cards. Of these, none were more often repeated than those involving self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass” Jimmy Martin, a notorious loose canon. In 1998 music writer Tom Piazza followed Martin on a harrowing visit to the Grand Ole Opry, during which the inebriated singer came close to fisticuffs with at least two members of that venerable institution. Ten years after appearing in The Oxford American, the resulting article, “True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass,” is now available in paperback.