Book Reviews

Basil Hero looks into the hearts of the “farmboy nerds” of NASA’s race to the moon and finds modest men with the ability to sequester their fears and focus on a task. Hero will discuss The Mission of a Lifetime at Novel in Memphis on April 28.

Southern Lady Code, writes Helen Ellis, is “a technique by which, if you don’t have something nice to say, you say something not-so-nice in a nice way.” Ellis will discuss her new essay collection at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 30.

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.