Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Hamilton Cain

From Heights Looking Down

Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone renders Chattanooga in cinematic detail

With echoes of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Sybil Baker’s new novel, While You Were Gone, deftly explores family relationships—and family secrets. Baker will appear at Star Line Books in Chattanooga on June 22, and at the Chattanooga Readers and Writers Fair on June 23.

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Unanticipated Consequences

Sarah E. Igo’s The Known Citizen considers the case for privacy

In her sweeping, meticulously researched new book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, Sarah E. Igo charts the evolution of privacy as a peculiarly American principle. Igo will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 12.

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Suffused with Color and Light and Personality

The Afterlives is a departure for Thomas Pierce

At the age of thirty-three, Jim Byrd suffers a cardiac arrest but is resuscitated after being clinically dead. Afterward, he’s fine—except that he can’t recall any sense of an afterlife, any glow at the end of a tunnel. Thomas Pierce will read from his debut novel, The Afterlives, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

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A Life’s Work to Save the Planet

Despite climate calamities unfolding daily around the globe, Al Gore finds hope for the future

An Inconvenient Sequel unpacks the latest scientific data about climate change and spotlights ongoing advocacy efforts around the world. For this book Al Gore focuses on three simple questions: “Must we change?” “Can we change?” “Will we change?”

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The Stench of Slavery

Ben H. Winters creates an alternate history in which the Civil War never took place

In the alternative history Ben H. Winters creates in Underground Airlines, slavery has flourished in the Hard Four—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and a unified Carolina—because it is essential to the economic prosperity of the plantations. Winters will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15. Festival events are free and open to the public.

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Who’s Responsible for Changing Racist Minds?

Ibram X. Kendi will discuss his National Book Award-winning history of racism at the Nashville Public Library

Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is an achievement, astonishing for its ingenious structure, breadth of research, wealth of anecdote, and engaging conversational voice. Kendi will appear at the Nashville Public Library on September 15 at 6:15 p.m.

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