May 4, 2011 In 1933, by the time William Dodd arrived in Berlin with his wife and two grown children, the country he had loved as a university student was almost completely gone. As was the case with most foreign observers in the early days of Hitler’s Germany, it was not immediately obvious to Dodd that anything was amiss, but as Erik Larson demonstrates in his captivating new book, Dodd would spend his four-year term as ambassador trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Larson will discuss and sign In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin at the Nashville Public Library on May 10 at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series.

May 3, 2011 In her new book, Gone: A Photographic Plea for Preservation, architect and photographer Nell Dickerson teams up with the late Shelby Foote, her cousin by marriage, to offer two intertwining tales of a disappearing South. The first is a Foote novella that recounts the loss of historic structures to the torches of Union soldiers during the Civil War nearly 150 years ago. The second is the story told through Dickerson’s images, which document the neglect, poverty, and apathy that have caused the disappearance of so many historic buildings since the war. Nell Dickerson will discuss Gone: A Photographic Plea for Presentation at DK Booksellers in Memphis on May 7 at 1 p.m.