Book Reviews

In his latest book, Entertaining Race, Michael Eric Dyson considers the performative aspect of race in American culture and politics. Dyson will discuss Entertaining Race at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 12.

Between Shades of Gray, an award-winning 2011 YA novel by Nashville writer Ruta Sepetys, has been adapted as a stunning graphic novel illustrated by Dave Kopka and a talented support team. The story explores the horrors of Stalin’s gulags as experienced by a young Lithuanian artist deported to Siberia in 1941 with her mother and brother.

Bestselling author and self-described “religious overachiever” Rachel Held Evans describes a way of pursuing God that embraces uncertainty, vulnerability, and compassion in Wholehearted Faith, a posthumous collection of essays, co-authored by Jeff Chu.

In Paper Bullets: Two Women Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, Rhodes College historian Jeffrey H. Jackson has captured one of those stories from the edges of World War II, and the result is a fascinating examination of community and resistance, gender and sexuality, and what it means to recognize the humanity in every person.

Louise Erdrich’s bookstore-set ghost story, The Sentence, takes place between All Souls’ Eve 2019 and All Souls’ Eve 2020, a year of troubling, destabilizing events, when the “rules for being alive kept changing.” Erdrich will discuss The Sentence at a ticketed virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 9.

In an age when many find justice elusive, some have resorted to the courtroom of fiction. The Trees by Percival Everett is a prime example of this literary justice, examining an American history of lynching, racism, and police brutality.