Book Reviews | Chapter 16

The Root of a Person

Light to the Hills tells a story of bringing literacy and light to impoverished people

By Tina Chambers | March 22, 2023

Light to the Hills contains many of the traditional elements of Appalachian life — tales of moonshine and cock fighting, feuds and floods, coal mining and snake handling — but in Bonnie Blaylock’s lyrical prose, they come alive in a new way to tell a powerful story of family ties, mountain ways, and mountain justice. Blaylock will sign her book at Linebaugh Public Library in Murfreesboro on April 5.

Nashville Heroes

Journalist Tim Ghianni recalls decades covering country legends

By G. Robert Frazier | March 21, 2023

Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes is a tribute to Nashville’s country music legends and the city’s past.

Boundaries and Chaos

Mary-Alice Daniel’s debut poetry collection interrogates our sense of order

By Sara Beth West | March 20, 2023

Mary-Alice Daniel’s Mass for Shut-Ins is the winner of the 2022 Yale Younger Poets Prize. The poems in this debut collection ask readers to live inside a porousness of borders, both physical and mental.

Affrilachia from A to Z

Frank X Walker’s new picture book pays tribute to Black life in Appalachia

By Julie Danielson | March 15, 2023

Frank X Walker’s A Is for Affrilachia, illustrated by upfromsumdirt, is a picture book for all ages.

A Breath of Fresh Air

John Seigenthaler promoted thoughtful discourse one book at a time

By Tina Chambers | March 14, 2023

A Word on Words: The Best of John Seigenthaler’s Interviews celebrates the significant contribution to the American literary landscape made by Nashville’s John Seigenthaler, a legendary journalist and First Amendment advocate.

Wounded Eagle

Matthew Desmond’s new book dispels myths about poverty in America

By Liz Garrigan | March 13, 2023

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America offers a persuasive case that we should all become “poverty abolitionists” who refuse to live as “unwitting enemies of the poor.” Desmond will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20.

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning