A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Nonfiction

Chronicling Life and Death

By Emily Choate

December 20, 2012 Another documentary about Damien Echols is set to open on Christmas Day: West of Memphis, which producer Peter Jackson has called “the most important film” he’s ever made. Meanwhile, Echols is still fighting for full exoneration, both for himself and for the other men convicted with him. This struggle for understanding is evident in the excruciating detail with which Echols writes about his time on death row. His emphasis on the torturous aspects of his experience (in both prison life and the poverty-wracked Southern childhood preceding it) is the aspect of the book that critics have most often highlighted in their reviews.

An Old-Time Progressive Revival

By Paul McCoy

December 17, 2012 Twelve years into a new century, the U.S. is coming to grips with some hard truths: credit is finite, and our houses aren’t ATMs. We are less satisfied with our work, yet we work more and earn less. We are bombarded by advertisements and “news” that often obscures the facts. And our schools are training students for twenty-first-century jobs that may be outsourced overseas anyway. All in all, it’s a bleak picture, but Bill Ivey—writer, teacher, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, principal in Global Cultural Strategies, and trustee of the Center for American Progress—believes we have the tools to create a post-consumerist society. He talks with Chapter 16 about Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy, a new book that outlines his ambitious vision for a new era.

An Old-Time Progressive Revival

Under the Guns

By Ralph Bowden

December 14, 2012 In 1946, soon after returning from World War II, Marine lieutenant Christopher S. Donner wrote a memoir that chronicled his experiences as an artillery officer in the Pacific. Lt. Donner served as a Forward Observer in Okinawa, literally under the guns, spotting where the shells hit and calling in adjustments to the battery behind. More than sixty years later, Jack H. McCall, an attorney in Knoxville and a former Army officer, has edited and annotated Donner’s manuscript. Pacific Time on Target is a thoughtful portrait of the Pacific war from the point of view of a junior officer in the thick of things.

Under the Guns

A Massive Whitewash

By Robert Cheatham

December 11, 2012 “The Nashville Way” is a phrase coined in the 1960s to describe the more civilized manner in which the white establishment of Nashville behaved when confronted with demands of equality from the black people of Nashville than did, say, the white establishment of Birmingham. But in his new book, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City, historian Benjamin Houston concludes that the slogan was nothing more than “a massive whitewash on multiple levels,” and he tells why in narratives from the perspective of both the white establishment and the leadership of the black community. On the whole, he writes, “it is the story of a society wrestling with yet willfully ignoring its racial reality. More fundamentally it is the story of how a racial status quo, after decades of upheaval, was both changed and yet preserved.”

The Magazine at the Corner of Second and Church

By Tina LoTufo

December 10, 2012 In May 2011, Roy Burkhead was hit by a car at the intersection of Church Street and 2nd Avenue in downtown Nashville. (He was not seriously injured.) In many people, such an experience might spark musings on mortality, but for Burkhead it sparked the idea for a literary journal. “This event forced me to pause and look around,” he says. “I was interested to realize just how many different aspects of Nashville were represented from this particular spot of town. Maybe it was the impact of the bumper, but I started to ponder that this specific spot could work as a great metaphor, a virtual location in this actual city.” One year later, he published the first issue of 2nd & Church.

Jefferson’s Shadow

By Tim Boyd

December 6, 2012 In a new biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham considers not only Jefferson’s political career but also the ways he operated in both the political and intellectual spheres of the early American republic. In recent years, biographers have cast a more critical light on Jefferson’s career, often focusing on the disconnect between his intellectual ideals and his political behavior. While acknowledging that the third president was far from perfect, Meacham makes the case for seeing Jefferson as a pragmatist rather than a hypocrite. Meacham will discuss Thomas Jefferson at the Nashville Public Library on December 13 at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

Jefferson’s Shadow

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