Chapter 16 - Part 535

Killer Reading

Jane Bradley’s new book is a horrifying crime novel that somehow manages to inspire hope

By Liz Garrigan | May 18, 2011

May 18, 2011 It’s the rare novel that can detail horrific evil and still illuminate the best of the human spirit, turning a reader thoughtful, inward, almost spiritual. That’s what Chattanooga native Jane Bradley has managed to do with her new book You Believers, a heartbreaking narrative with a capacity for finding deliverance in the wake of a life devastated by evil. Bradley will sign copies of the book at 7 p.m. on May 19 at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood.

Fragile

A baby’s life-threatening illness brought Hamilton Cain a new understanding of his own childhood

By Beth Waltemath | May 17, 2011

May 17, 2011 Hamilton Cain is a natural storyteller. During his adolescence in Chattanooga, his way with words convinced his conservative family that he was anointed to preach. But it also gained him entry into a wider and more challenging world than the one offered by his strict Southern Baptist childhood: after college at the University of Virginia, Cain became a journalist in New York City. But the discovery that his first infant son had been born with a debilitating and degenerative genetic disease sent Hamilton Cain on a search to discover what liberation and affirmation can be found in a childhood he thought he had left behind forever. This Boy’s Faith is the story of a father who learns what it means to be faithful through raising his medically fragile son.

All Quiet Now

The Village Idiot was a maddening presence and a comical Facebook character—until he was suddenly gone

By Eileen Sisk | May 16, 2011

May 16, 2011 Save for the pouring rain and a yapping miniature pinscher next door, it is eerily silent as I write this. Under normal circumstances, all manner of small engines would be revving—yes, even in a downpour—as I write, but not today. My next-door-neighbor, the one I called the Village Idiot, the one I turned into a Facebook phenomenon with posts about the constant noise of chainsaws and log splitters emanating from next door, is gone.

No Bull

Roy Blount Jr. schools The Wall Street Journal on the fun of playing with words

By Margaret Renkl | May 16, 2011

May 16, 2011 Nobody fiddles with words better than Roy Blount Jr. A regular on National Public Radio’s quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the Vanderbilt graduate also serves as a usage adviser to The American Heritage Dictionary and has written two books—2009’s Alphabet Juice and this summer’s Alphabetter Juice—that are sort of like dictionaries in their own right, only dictionaries glossed by a master comic.

A Story of Love and Magic

Award-winning children’s author Kate DiCamillo talks with Chapter 16 about her newest novel

By Susannah Felts | May 13, 2011

May 13, 2011 In The Magician’s Elephant, the 2009 novel from award-winning children’s novelist Kate DiCamillo, an orphan named Peter Duchene cannot shake the suspicion that his younger sister, who died in infancy, is out there somewhere, still alive. After a fortuneteller tells Peter that his sister does indeed live, and that an elephant will help him locate her, the boy begins to follow his doubts and hopes. Finally out in paperback, the tale that unfolds is a genuine pleasure for all ages, imbued with plentiful allegorical potential and dashes of humor, and is sure to inspire discussions about truth, honesty, and belief. Kate DiCamillo will discuss the book at DK Booksellers in Memphis on May 13 at 6 p.m.

Haunted by the Ghost of Hank Williams

Steve Earle’s debut novel is a skid-row story of grit and redemption

By Susannah Felts | May 12, 2011

May 12, 2011 Progressive country music star Steve Earle’s debut novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, is a somber tale featuring no less than the ghost of the great Hank Williams Sr. (The title is borrowed from one of Hank’s hit songs.) In this tale of addiction and redemption, released concurrently with an album of the same name, Earle almost certainly draws from the depths of his own darkest days in creating the tragic figure of Doc, a physician turned morphine addict. But one of several surprises in this accomplished first novel is the fact that it is neither a thinly disguised autobiography, nor a musician’s tale.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher