Book Reviews

In her new memoir, Greek to Me, Mary Norris proves to be a fantastic companion and guide—the perfect person to breathe life into a dead language. Norris will discuss the book in a conversation with Ann Patchett at The Parthenon in Nashville on April 28.

A frequent visitor to her grandparents’ Oak Ridge home as a child, sociologist Lindsey A. Freeman grew up under the shadow of an atomic cloud, an experience she explores in a new memoir, This Atom Bomb in Me.

In her debut memoir, Mother Winter, Sophia Shalmiyev creates a haunting, lyrical meditation on her troubled mother, an alcoholic whom Shalmiyev and her father left behind when they emigrated to the United States from Russia. Shalmiyev will discuss Mother Winter at Third Man Records in Nashville on April 28.

With Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews, editors Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis encourage a new community of readers to revisit the ideas and experiences of civil-rights activists and thinkers during the movement’s height.

In And Then You Were Gone, Nashville debut novelist R.J. Jacobs creates an unlikely heroine in a child psychologist with an unstable past. Jacobs, a practicing psychologist, will appear at Star Line Books in Chattanooga on April 27.

“Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979,” writes Nathaniel Rich in Losing Earth. “The conditions for success were so favorable that they have the quality of a fable.” Rich will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17.