August 16, 2013 Philip Mudd’s Takedown purports to be Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda, and in some sense it is. More than that, though, it is a consideration of the way the American intelligence establishment responded to 9/11 and subsequent terrorist threats. It’s also a career memoir: Mudd, who now lives in Memphis, began in 1985 as a junior intelligence analyst at the CIA and rose to important managerial positions at both the CIA and the FBI. A dedicated insider, he respects the context in which he flourished and the people he worked with in the complex counterterrorist bureaucracy.

August 14, 2013 As a young English professor in the late 1960s, author and literary critic Gerald Duff held appointments at both Vanderbilt and Kenyon, where he came into frequent close contact with the major poets and critics of the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. In Fugitive Days, Duff shares both comic and poignant tales of his encounters with Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson. He also examines the impact of the Fugitives’ poetry, the New Criticism, and the controversial Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, on the American literary landscape.

August 13, 2013 Peter Carlson’s third work of history, Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey, relates the true and little-known tale of two intrepid Yankee reporters captured and imprisoned in the Confederacy. This grand tale of adventure reveals much about the Civil War without rehashing the well-worn stories of battles and leaders. It is a gloriously entertaining book that should be on the reading list of anyone curious about the underbelly of the Civil War.