A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Playing for Keeps

February 25, 2013 As bestselling author Evan Thomas recounts in Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, the thirty-fourth president was a master at both reading people and playing the odds, abilities that served him well whether at the bridge table or the negotiating table. Thomas argues that Ike bluffed his way through eight years of confrontation with the Russians and Chinese, preventing a war that he believed would leave civilization a smoldering heap. Thomas will appear with Jon Meacham to discuss Ike’s Bluff at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on February 28, as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

Social History, Illuminated

February 14, 2013 The American fascination with technology began in the late nineteenth century with the development of electric light. Many researchers and experimenters were involved in the discovery, though credit usually goes to Thomas Edison because he successfully commercialized his model of the incandescent bulb. As University of Tennessee historian Ernest Freeberg notes in a new book, the effect of adequate illumination—on work, entertainment, family life, safety, medicine, social class, architecture, business, and industry—was enormous. The Age of Edison is a social history of America from about 1880 to 1935, as illuminated by electric light. Freeberg will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 21 at 6 p.m.

Wake Up!

January 28, 2013 In his new book, The Future, Al Gore condemns the corrupting influence of money and warns of the destructive power of “emergent phenomena” which have the power to destroy life as we know it. Gore will appear at Belmont University in Nashville on February 2 at 2 p.m., and at the Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on February 18 at 12 noon. Both events require book purchase for entrance. Click here for event details in Nashville and here for those in Memphis.

Beyond the Blank Page

January 25, 2013 In Writing—the Sacred Art Rabbi Rami Shapiro and his son, Aaron Shapiro, turn a beloved genre inside out. Writing as one voice to insure coherence and illustrate the constructed nature of the narrated “I,” they offer sage advice for the person who really wants to write a book but should first spend more time deconstructing the self: “The self is a story and nothing more,” they note. “By now you know that you are never the story you tell.”

Fugitive Truth

January 23, 2013 The Oxford American’s new editor-in-chief, Roger D. Hodge, talks with Chapter 16 about his view of editing as a “conversational” process. The point of the conversation, he says, is to serve the stories themselves: “When everything comes together in just the right way, so that the stories are winking and glancing across the issue at one another, something magical happens. You have a self-contained whole, a world within the world.”

Fugitive Truth

Everything You Know about Pit Bulls is Wrong

January 17, 2012 Ken Foster—photographer, writer, reader, and dog lover—is on a mission to reverse the bad rap on pit bulls. I’m a Good Dog: Pit Bulls, America’s Most Beautiful (and Misunderstood) Pet is his homage to the dog made famous by both Petey of The Little Rascals and the tortured animals rescued from Michael Vick’s dog-fighting ring. Foster will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 24 at 6 p.m., and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on January 26 at 2 p.m.

Everything You Know about Pit Bulls is Wrong

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