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.”

December 1, 2010 At first glance, Roy Blount Jr.’s Hail, Hail, Euphoria! Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made appears to be an essay, perhaps for Entertainment Weekly, that got out of hand. It is 145 pages long, including photos and a page of photo credits, and they aren’t very big pages at that, barely registering eight-by-five inches. The title is almost longer than the book. The book is barely longer than the script of the 1933 farce it celebrates. But dip into the pages of all things Fredonia, and you realize you are in the presence of a profoundly gifted (Groucho) Marxist delivering his greatest lecture on (Groucho) Marxism.

November 17, 2010 “A spy prefers to share only that which is to his benefit, no more, and much of what he shares will not be true,” cautions the journalist Steve Hendricks in an early chapter of A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial. “This presents a conundrum for all who would understand espionage: Trust spies not at all, and one learns nothing. Trust them too much, and one might as well have learned nothing.” In researching his new nonfiction thriller, Hendricks, a freelance reporter living in Knoxville, appears to have trusted spies just the right amount, interviewing them on three continents over the course of two years. He clearly learned a great deal—not only about spies, but also about the terrorists they seek to catch by any means they deem necessary.

November 5, 2010 Lee Sandlin’s Wicked River is a wickedly funny new history of the great Mississippi, whose violent, profane, drunken, calamitous, hypocritical character is perhaps an archetype of the American character itself. Sandlin will discuss Wicked River at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on November 9 at 6 p.m.

October 20, 2010 Novelist and anthologist Sonny Brewer may have hit upon the best-ever idea for an essay collection. Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit contains accounts by Pat Conroy, John Grisham, Winston Groom, and a score of other Southern writers on the sorts of work they did on their way to becoming professional writers.

September 20, 2010 In Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway, Matt Dellinger writes about an unlikely subject: a highway linking Canada to Mexico that may never be completed. (In Tennessee, for example, I-69 remains nothing more than a page of maps and studies on the state Department of Transportation website.) Touted as the “NAFTA Highway” after the North American Free Trade Agreement, the highway is, like the trade deal, controversial, and in that conflict Dellinger has found a story. Matt Dellinger will discuss Interstate 69 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on September 23 at 6 p.m. and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 24 at 2 p.m.