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Chapter 16
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A Dog's Best Friend

Robert J. Blake’s new picture book teaches kids how friendship really works

By Joe Nolan |

March 22, 2011 Robert J. Blake’s latest picture book features the tale of two best friends who’ll do anything to stay together. The protagonists of Painter and Ugly are a pair of dogs whose love for one another is nearly matched by their love of competing in Alaskan dog-sled races. Blake, who is also the book’s illustrator, immerses readers in the story of a Junior Iditarod race, a grueling test in which a group of competing teenagers push their dog-sled teams on a nearly eighty-mile trek into the Alaskan wilderness, only to complete the return run the very next day, after a night of camping in the cold with their dog teams. He recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.

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The Forgotten Holocaust

Ruta Sepetys’s YA debut chronicles Stalin’s murder of millions

By Fernanda Moore |

March 21, 2011 In 1939, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of millions of Baltic civilians to forced labor camps. More than twenty million people perished in the gulags, but even those who managed to survive and return home were forbidden to reveal the atrocities they’d suffered in the camps. Nashville author Ruta Sepetys, whose stunning debut novel Between Shades of Gray aims, finally, to tell the long-suppressed truth about Stalin’s mass atrocities, grew up in the culture of silence imposed on camp survivors.

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The Tennessee Wing

Al Gore leaves his longtime publisher to join Jon Meacham at Random House

By Margaret Renkl |

March 21, 2011 Al Gore has left Rodale, publisher of his mega-bestselling books, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Our Choice (2009), and plans to publish his next book with Random House. (A third bestseller, The Assault on Reason, was published by Penguin in 2007.) The still-untitled book, reportedly about “our global future,” is due next year and will be edited by Jon Meacham, a Chattanooga native who recently left his post as editor of Newsweek.

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Grim Days for Bookstores

The news just keeps getting worse for people who like to browse for books in person

By Margaret Renkl |

March 18, 2011 Readers in Knoxville were still mourning the impending loss of Carpe Librum, the beloved independent, when the news came that Ohio-based bookstore chain Joseph-Beth would close Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, a fixture in the community for thirty years.

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The Poet's Almanac

Garrison Keillor highlights the work of Nashville poet Mark Jarman

By Margaret Renkl |

March 17, 2011 Today Garrison Keillor’s daily NPR feature, The Writer’s Almanac, will highlight a poem from Mark Jarman’s new collection, Bone Fires. “A Prayer for Our Daughters” begins with these lovely lines:

     May they never be lonely at parties
     Or wait for mail from people they haven’t written
     Or still in middle age ask God for favors
     Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

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Seeing in the Dark

John Egerton considers a new memoir by a blind man—and the whole future of book publishing

By John Egerton |

March 17, 2011 The book business is in serious trouble. In Nashville alone, Zibart’s and Mills are so long-gone that most shoppers in their Hillsboro Village and Green Hills neighborhoods have never heard of them. Now Davis-Kidd is also gone, and OutLoud too, and Borders on West End is tiptoeing under a corporate-bankruptcy cloud. In Knoxville, Carpe Librum is shuttered. In Memphis, BookStar is gone, too, and the only remaining Davis-Kidd outlet in the state is in limbo because its Ohio-based corporate owners have filed for bankruptcy protection. Author John Egerton considers this blighted landscape and finds a ray of hope in the persistence of self-published authors like David Meador, who are helping to keep the literary embers warm in these distressing times. David Meador will discuss and autograph Broken Eyes, Unbroken Spirit at BookMan/BookWoman in Nashville on March 22 at 5 p.m.

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