Nonfiction

August 3, 2012 During the nineteenth century, the Ku Klux Klan (founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, after the Civil War) had quickly been suppressed, only to reappear and spread with surprising virulence in 1915. How, asks Kelly J. Baker, a lecturer in religious and American studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and author of Gospel According to the Klan, did an organization we find so reprehensible today come to occupy a place so close to the center of the American mainstream?

August 2, 2012, 2012 Deep East Texas in the 1940s and ’50s was a tough environment for a bookish kid. As Gerald Duff describes in his memoir, Home Truths, growing up there required creative and spontaneous lying to survive. As it turns out, being a skillful liar proved useful throughout his life, as well—personally, professionally, and literarily. Duff will discuss Home Truths at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

July 26, 2012 David George Haskell, professor of biology at the University of the South in Sewanee, spent a year carefully observing a small patch of Tennessee forest. His book about the experience, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, is a scientist’s meditation that rises to the philosophical level of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Thoreau’s Walden. David Haskell will discuss The Forest Unseen at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

July 20, 2012 When Joel F. Baker Jr. launched into what became a three-and-some-decades-long research project on the history of his family on his mother’s side, writing a book was most certainly the farthest thing from his thoughts. He was in the seventh grade, after all. But he was driven by a curiosity that never waned in subsequent years—a curiosity that girds the upbeat spirit of The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, a rare hybrid of oral history, traditional chronicle, and memoir. In it Baker brings alive both antebellum and post-bellum life on a quintessentially Middle Tennessee plantation, tightly weaving throughout the quality of urgency that has characterized his life’s pursuit. Baker will discuss The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

July 12, 2012 Vivian Swift, the author of When Wanderers Cease to Roam (2008), abandoned her garden trowel and Adirondack chair, packed her bags, and doodled enough during her honeymoon in France to write a book about the experience. Swift’s ode to travel—and to France, too, though chiefly to travel—includes hundreds of her own watercolor illustrations, notes, and captions, which make the book feel more like an intimate collection of remembrances and a kind of quirky catalog of travel recipes than a straight memoir. “Travel is a lot like sex,” writes Swift. “It’s very personal, prone to fads, and competitive; and we’re all secretly curious how other people do it.” Swift will discuss and sign Le Road Trip at 2 p.m. July 14 at Parnassus Books in Nashville.