Chapter 16 - Part 36

A Political Awakening

D’Army Bailey recounts his student days of protest and outrage

By Maria Browning | November 12, 2009

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.

New Fiction from the Unsettled South

Is a story still “Southern” if it sounds like a bulletin from Anywhere, U.S.A.?

By Maria Browning | October 7, 2009

“Rootedness used to be the core quality of Southern culture,” writes Madison Smartt Bell in his introduction to New Stories from the South 2009: The Year’s Best. Bell goes on to note that the lives of contemporary Southerners have taken on a “nomadic quality” that competes with the former importance of place. And that presents a problem for this collection, the twenty-fourth in the series.

After Memphis

Journalist Clay Risen looks at the legacy of King assassination, then and now

By Maria Browning | October 6, 2009

Clay Risen‘s A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination offers a detailed examination of the riots that ravaged U.S. cities after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in April 1968. Drawing on a rich array of sources, including firsthand recollections, Risen depicts a country that was not united in mourning, but divided by rage and fear.

Semi-Tragic Romance

In Manette Ansay’s fictional world, men and women are doomed to disappoint each other

By Maria Browning | October 5, 2009

Good Things I Wish You is Manette Ansay‘s eighth book and arguably her most ambitious. Ansay originally conceived it as a historical novel, but it evolved into a story that, she says, “leans backwards out of the present world and into the 1860s.”

Voices of Stone

Poetic interpretations of a master sculptor’s work

By Maria Browning | October 2, 2009

Nashville sculptor William Edmondson believed he worked at God’s command. In a collection of poems for young readers, Elizabeth Spires gives his creations voices of their own.

In Praise of Doubt

Grappling with ethical and existential dilemmas (religion optional)

By Maria Browning | September 14, 2009

David Dark—a schoolteacher, scholar and evangelical gadfly—urges his readers to question everything, including the whole of orthodox religion and even their belief in God. Consequently, although his new book was clearly conceived with a Christian audience in mind, Dark’s thoughtful iconoclasm invites anyone to, as he puts it, “submit everything we’re up to, at work and at play, to the discipline of sacred questioning.”

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher