The opening essay of Imani Perry’s Black in Blues sets up the book’s premise: that woven throughout the story of Black life, history, and culture, you’ll find blue — the color itself, the “blues” as an expression for melancholy, and its namesake sound, the Black-born music of heartache and hope.
The Wounds Are the Witness by Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, serves as devotional reading, a summons to self-care, and encouragement for everyday action and outspokenness.
In On Freedom, Yale historian Timothy Snyder explores the possibility of a true freedom that is more than the absence of repression. Snyder will speak at Rhodes College in Memphis on March 30.
Code Name: Pale Horse, Scott Payne’s memoir of his years as an undercover agent infiltrating white supremacist groups, shines a glimmering light on our nation’s underbelly. Payne will discuss the book at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on March 27.
Author Marianne Richmond, best known for her award-winning children’s books, has written a powerful new memoir that provides a glimpse into her own troubled childhood with a neglectful mother and an undiagnosed illness. Richmond will discuss If You Were My Daughter at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20.
How and when did the Civil War end? That’s the question examined by Michael Vorenberg in Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War. There is no simple answer, and his investigation leads to uncomfortable questions about the nature of war in today’s world.
