Nonfiction

May 3, 2013 Wayne B. Drash’s On These Courts: A Miracle Season that Changed a City, a Once-Future Star, and a Team Forever is the story of how former NBA star guard Penny Hardaway coached the boys’ basketball team at Lester Middle School—where he had once played himself—to a Tennessee state championship. That season provides a backdrop to the most inspiring sports story to come out of Memphis since Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, and like that book, it too seems custom-made for Hollywood. Drash and Hardaway will discuss and sign copies of On These Courts at the University of Memphis Bookstore on May 8 at 6 p.m., and at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on May 10 at 6 p.m.

April 17, 2013 John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, set out on a walk from Indiana to the Gulf in the fall of 1867. In Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867-68 historian James B. Hunt traces that walk through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. At the time, Muir was already a serious student of botany with a powerful calling to observe and collect species, especially in regions unfamiliar to him, but his thinking about the relationship of humans to the rest of nature was not yet completely formed. Hunt will discuss Restless Fires at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 24 at 6 p.m.