Taking Charge
August 12, 2013 In Coup: The Day the Democrats Ousted Their Governor, Put Republican Lamar Alexander in Office Early, and Stopped a Pardon Scandal, Nashvillian Keel Hunt remembers a day in 1979 that will long stand as both a model of bipartisanship and a defense of the people’s right to honest government. Hunt will discuss Coup at the Nashville Public Library (where he will appear with journalist John Seigenthaler) on August 15, 2013, at 6 p.m.; at at Vanderbilt University (where he will appear with Senator Lamar Alexander) on September 20 at 4:30 p.m.; and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All events are free and open to the public.
August 5, 2013 Denise Kiernan’s engaging new book explores the human side of the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the best-kept secrets in the saga of how the United States built the first nuclear weapons. Kiernan will discuss The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 31, 2013 During the late sixteenth century, the city of Nuremberg was a bustling commercial metropolis at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. As one of the first cities to convert to Lutheranism in the 1520s, it was also on the front lines of the Reformation. In The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, Vanderbilt historian Joel Harrington considers this world as it is revealed in the extensive diary of Frantz Schmidt, the city’s public executioner for more than forty years. Harrington will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 26, 2013 The eighteen contributors to An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots are a multicultural group: black, white, Native American, Asian, Latina, lesbian, straight—and that’s not even a complete list of their declared identities. But for all the writers’ apparent diversity, the personal essays in this collection reveal them to be sisters under the skin. Americans don’t like to acknowledge the profound, lingering influence of class, but the stories that Vanderbilt professor Lorraine López has collected in An Angle of Vision describe a set of experiences shaped by poverty that is shared across all boundaries of color and community. Feelings and memories echo so insistently throughout the book that the writers seem almost to be speaking with a single voice. Lopez will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 24, 2013 Andrew Hudgins is a distinguished poet and scholar, and he’s also a lifelong, inveterate teller of jokes. In his memoir, The Joker, he tells the story of his life through the jokes that marked its passages. Today he talks with Chapter 16 about what makes a great joke and why we need to look at the ugly side of humor. Hudgins will appear on July 27, 2013, at 4:15 p.m. at the Bairnwick Women’s Center on the campus of The University of the South in Sewanee. The event, part of the 
July 23, 2013 In 2008, Vanderbilt graduate and popular humorist Roy Blount Jr. became a modern-day Samuel Johnson with his twentieth book, Alphabet Juice, an eclectic—and often hysterical—dictionary of words and phrases that struck the author’s fancy. His new sequel, Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text, is funnier still. Blount will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 