February 23, 2012 Two Nashvillians, one current and one former, are among the finalists for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Robert K. Massie is honored in the biography category for Catherine the Great. Holly Tucker is the author of Blood Work, which is shortlisted in science and technology. The winner will be announced at a gala in Los Angeles on April 20.
Both books enjoyed critical and popular success when they were released last year. “Blood and the process of removing it from people are objects of enduring cultural fascination, as the glut of teenage vampire novels can attest,” wrote Veronique Greenwood in an article about Blood Work interview in The Atlantic. “It was not much different in 17th-century Europe at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, when a band of natural philosophers armed with knives and goose-quill tubes began to investigate the idea of transferring blood from one person or animal to another. Their story, as told in a new book by Vanderbilt University historian Holly Tucker, is vivid, strange, and reveals much about modern medicine.” Click here to learn more about the critical reception Blood Work received, and here to read Chapter 16‘s extensive coverage of Holly Tucker.
Tennessee readers may be startled to learn that celebrated historian Robert K. Massie spent much of his childhood in Nashville. Massie’s book, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, is the latest installment in his series of exhaustively researched narrative masterpieces focusing on Russian history. The book made the year-end lists of The New York Times Book Review and BookPage, IndieBound, and The Boston Globe. To read Fernanda Moore’s interview with Massie for Chapter 16, click here.
For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16’s News & Notes page, here.
