November 14, 2014 It’s tempting to close Curtis Wilkie’s new collection, Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians and Other People of Interest, reach for a bottle of bourbon, and sigh about how they don’t make journalists like they used to. Wilkie will discuss and sign copies at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on November 21, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
November 12, 2014 Like any great biography, Andrew Maraniss’s Strong Inside concerns more than just its subject. It is also a history of Vanderbilt, of Nashville, of the SEC; a history of basketball and Southern sports culture and how they clashed with the civil-rights movement. Above all it is a meditation on the personal price of progress, about what happens to the people we ask to be racial pioneers, and what we—as whites, as blacks—owe them in return. Maraniss will discuss Strong Inside at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. The discussion will be moderated by Mayor Karl Dean.
September 22, 2014 New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, have followed their worldwide bestseller, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women, with a sequel of sorts. A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity looks at innovative ways to make a difference in the world. Prior to his appearance at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014, Kristof sat down with Chapter 16 to discuss poverty, opportunity, and what everyday donors can do to change another person’s life.
February 4, 2014 In June 1966, James Meredith began his “March Against Fear” from the sidewalk just outside the Peabody Hotel. As Aram Goudsouzian, a historian at the University of Memphis, documents in Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, his gripping account of that summer in Mississippi, Meredith’s march occurred at a turning point for the civil-rights movement. Goudsouzian will discuss Down to the Crossroads on February 11, 2014, at Parnassus Books in Nashville; on February 13, 2014, at Rhodes College in Memphis; and on February 24, 2014, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis.
October 17, 2013 Chapter 16’s own Clay Risen, author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, will launch his new book, American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye, at a whiskey-tasting event at Barista Parlor in East Nashville October 25, 2013, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 and include a copy of the book. All proceeds benefit Humanities Tennessee. Today Chapter 16 is publishing an excerpt from the book, as well as Q&A with Risen, but to get a real taste for American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye, you’ll need to reserve your spot at Barista Parlor by clicking here.
October 16, 2013 There was a time, not too long ago, when you could tell a lot about a Tennessean by his thoughts on the snail darter. The three-inch-long fish, a member of the perch family, lives in certain reaches of Chickamauga Creek and the Sequatchie River, both in East Tennessee. It used to live in the Little Tennessee River, too, until the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Tellico Dam, which destroyed the steady stream of fresh water that the fish needed to survive. In The Snail Darter and the Dam, Zygmunt J.B. Plater, the UT law professor who led the challenge to TVA, tells the full story.
