Nonfiction

August 21, 2013 In dark, poetic, and often brilliant prose, Michael Hainey’s wrenching autobiography, After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Story, sets out to uncover long-held secrets and discover the truth about a death in the family that has haunted Hainey for decades. He will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013. All events are free and open to the public.

August 16, 2013 Philip Mudd’s Takedown purports to be Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda, and in some sense it is. More than that, though, it is a consideration of the way the American intelligence establishment responded to 9/11 and subsequent terrorist threats. It’s also a career memoir: Mudd, who now lives in Memphis, began in 1985 as a junior intelligence analyst at the CIA and rose to important managerial positions at both the CIA and the FBI. A dedicated insider, he respects the context in which he flourished and the people he worked with in the complex counterterrorist bureaucracy.