Presidents Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, all played roles in the tale Clay Risen tells in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Risen, a Nashville native and editor for The New York Times, takes a fresh look at the dark side of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers and lives with accusations of communism.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: When she died in 1960, Zora Neale Hurston left behind a manuscript that tells the story of Oluale Kossola, known in the United States as Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. With editing by Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in 2018.
The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter, an essay anthology edited by Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard, surveys Carter’s large body of writing and considers what it reveals about the man from Plains, Georgia.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The historical figures at the center of Set the World on Fire by Keisha Blain are outside the halls of power: They are Black, they are women, they are poor or working-class, and they advocate ideas that fall outside the political mainstream.
When novelist Geraldine Brooks received the devastating phone call informing her that her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, had died unexpectedly, she found herself unable to grieve. In her new memoir, Memorial Days, Brooks recounts traveling to a remote island off the Tasmanian coast, seeking a space in which she can engage “a grief deep enough to reflect our love.” Brooks will discuss Memorial Days at a ticketed event at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on February 13.
Chantha Nguon’s Slow Noodles chronicles her life growing up in Cambodia and her family’s flight to Vietnam to escape persecution under Lon Nol, before Year Zero and the terror of the Khmer Rouge. The book also describes the comfort of the delicious food made by Nguon’s mother, her sister, and later, by her. Nguon invites readers to understand Cambodian culture through both the pain of the past and the delicious flavors that fed hope for the future. Nguon, along with her daughter Clara Kim and co-author Kim Green, talked with Chapter 16 about how the memoir came to be.
