Big Men on Campus
In How College Presidents Succeed, Michael Nelson extracts wisdom from three generations of a family known as “Virginia’s academic dynasty.”
Nonfiction
Peace a Long Time Coming
For Barbara Presnell, the loss of her father at age 14 would lead to a decades-long period of repressed mourning, resulting in depression and estrangement from her family. Her memoir, Otherwise, I’m Fine, recounts the pain of that time and how retracing her father’s steps during World War II brought her peace and a renewed relationship with her family.
“Who Do You Think You Are?”
In The Trouble of Color, Martha S. Jones interrogates how her Kentucky ancestors negotiated the “color line” and what it has meant in her own life.
In the Drink
The William Faulkner we meet in Lisa C. Hickman’s Between Grief and Nothing could have been one of his own doom-struck characters.
A Timely Reckoning
David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.
God Is Change
In her essay collection about faith and science, World Without End, Martha Park identifies the uncanny overlaps between conflicting beliefs and gently prods at the heart of them. Park will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on May 6.
