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Clay Risen

American Homer

For Clay Risen, Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War is this nation’s Iliad

By Clay Risen |

April 13, 2011 Like his putative Greek forerunner, Shelby Foote was not a trained historian but a master storyteller. He wrote four well-received novels before embarking on The Civil War, including Shiloh, a fictional account of the 1862 battle. Long after completing his trilogy of history books, he continued to think of himself first and foremost as a fiction writer: “I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a novel, but I think it’s certainly by a novelist,” he said.

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Chekhov in Memphis

Novelist Richard Bausch adds the Dayton Literary Peace Prize to a shelf full of awards

By Clay Risen |

December 23, 2010 When novelist Richard Bausch was a child, his father would tell him about his days in the army, many of them spent slogging alongside hundreds of thousands of other Allied soldiers up the Italian Peninsula during World War II. These weren’t bedtime stories: what was supposed to be a quick conquest took nearly two years to complete, and 60,000 Allied soldiers, 50,000 Germans, and 50,000 Italian soldiers and partisans died in the process. It was the bloodiest theater in Western Europe. One of those stories became the basis for Bausch’s latest novel, Peace, which is dedicated to his father and which won the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

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Just What the Governor Ordered

In a new book, Phil Bredesen weighs in on the health-care debate

By Clay Risen |

October 12, 2010 Few American politicians are as well versed in the health-care debate as Tennessee Gov. Philip Bredesen. A former health-care executive, Bredesen came to office in 2002 promising to fix TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, which was driving the state deep into debt, and he has a lot to say about the landmark national health-care bill that passed this spring. In Fresh Medicine: How to Fix Reform and Build a Sustainable Health Care System, Bredesen provides a searing but non-partisan critique of the bill. Recently, Chapter 16 spoke with him about the book, which hits shelves today.

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A Legal Lynching

Journalist Alex Heard investigates the confounding historical case of Willie McGee

By Clay Risen |

July 19, 2010 Did a poor black man named Willie McGee rape a white housewife named Willette Hawkins in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1945? Was she even raped, or did she just dream it? Or were the two—as Bella Abzug alleged in McGee’s third trial—lovers? As journalist Alex Heard finds in The Eyes of Willie McGee, the truth is disturbingly gray. The book is part history and part detective story, with Heard intersplicing McGee’s story with the tale of his own hunt for the facts. Heard discusses the book at the downtown branch of Nashville Public Library on July 21 at 5 p.m., and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on July 22 at 6 p.m.

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Commodore Central

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer T.J. Stiles talks with Chapter 16 about the life and legacy of Cornelius Vanderbilt

By Clay Risen |

June 8, 2010 Around Nashville, Cornelius Vanderbilt is best known for the university that bears his name. Most folks are aware that Vanderbilt, like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, was one of the nineteenth century’s great industrial barons, and one of the first to command the nation’s vast rail networks. But where did he come from? And why would a Northern industrialist give a small treasure to fund a university in post-Civil War Tennessee? Biographer T.J. Stiles, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, talks with Chapter 16 about the Commodore.

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Focusing on the "Story" in History

Hampton Sides’s account of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. reads like a James Ellroy novel

By Clay Risen |

April 27, 2010 Like certain songs and film plots, there are some stories in history—George Washington’s life, D-Day—that can be taken up again and again, stories so captivating that all it takes is a good writer to give them new life. Martin Luther King’s murder is one of them, and Hampton Sides is the writer to tell it. He will give a free public reading from the book at Memphis University School on April 27 at 7 p.m.

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