Chapter 16 - Part 10

General Advice

Colin Powell’s new book highlights a lifetime in leadership—and a few mistakes

By Chris Scott | May 23, 2012

May 23, 2012 Colin Powell has spent over a half century as a leader. Now he wants to share the lessons he learned in all those years of working to inspire and manage people. In his latest book, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership, Powell passes along words of wisdom that would normally be handed down in private conversations between mentor and protégé. In providing examples both small and large, including those involving the controversies surrounding the war with Iraq, Powell has created a hybrid that is part memoir and part how-to book. Powell will appear in an onstage conversation with former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham on May 30 at 7 p.m. at Belmont University’s Massey Concert Hall. The event is part of the Salon@615 series.

Getting Inquisitive in France

Jefferson Bass takes the Body Farm series overseas

By Chris Scott | May 2, 2012

May 2, 2012 In The Inquisitor’s Key, Bill Brockton, the fictional incarnation of Bill Bass, world-famous founder of the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, travels to France, where ancient bones draw him into a very modern murder mystery. In their seventh outing, Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass, the writing team known as Jefferson Bass, have juxtaposed fourteenth-century religious fervor with twenty-first-century science. And if any combination of pursuits can prove deadly, it’s science and religion. Bass and Jefferson will be promoting The Inquisitor’s Key during May at several Tennessee venues.

Deciding Who Gets to Be God

In When the Killing’s Done, T.C. Boyle asks if humans can, or should, control nature

By Chris Scott | March 7, 2012

March 7, 2012 In his novel When the Killing’s Done, T.C. Boyle sets conservationists against animal-rights activists in a battle royal over the ecosystem of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. It’s a fight both philosophical and physical, and it leaves no one unscathed. Boyle will discuss and sign When the Killing’s Done on March 16 at the Nashville Public Library as part of the Salon@615 series. A free public reception begins at 6:15 p.m. and will be followed by a reading at 7. Click here for details.

Fighting a Monstrous Injustice

Historian Eric Foner talks with Chapter 16 about Abraham Lincoln’s complex views on slavery and race

By Chris Scott | February 21, 2012

February 21, 2012 As a young man in frontier Illinois, Abraham Lincoln became convinced that slavery was wrong. How to end the injustice, and whether to treat the former slaves as equal citizens, were questions Lincoln wrestled with for most of his life. These struggles are the subject of Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. On February 23 at 6:30 p.m., Foner will give the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History in the UC Theater at the University of Memphis.

Adding On

Robert Morgan retells the history of America’s westward expansion

By Chris Scott | November 9, 2011

November 9, 2011 In Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion, bestselling novelist and historian Robert Morgan tells the true stories of the men who added the territories from the Appalachians to the Pacific, thereby making a country out of a continent. Morgan will discuss Lions of the West at 7 p.m. on November 14 at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville.

Living In a Gray Area

Mark Greaney’s third novel pushes ex-CIA assassin Court Gentry deeper into the shadows

By Chris Scott | October 26, 2011

October 26, 2011 Court Gentry lives in a morally ambiguous world. In Ballistic by Memphis novelist Mark Greaney, the ex-CIA assassin brings his unique fighting skills to bear against some of the most violent people on earth—the Mexican drug cartels. The action is fast and deadly, and the shadows dark and deep, in this third outing for one of the thriller genre’s newest heroes.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher