Nonfiction | Chapter 16

Ecstasy in the Knowing

By Tina LoTufo

March 5, 2012

March 5, 2012 Eugenia Bone’s Mycophilia is the perfect “did-you-know” book. For instance, did you know that the largest single living organism on the planet is a fungus? Located in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, this particular specimen of the wood-decaying fungus Armillaria gallica is the size of 1,666 football fields and is more than two thousand years old. It’s been nicknamed “the humongous fungus.” Bone’s delightful book is full of such fascinating facts, as well as vivid portraits of the unique mycophiles (or “fungus-lovers”) who inhabit the tremendously diverse and often surprising world of mushrooms and their fungal relatives. Readers will enjoy the science but stay for the story of the author’s growing awareness of and appreciation for the world around her—and us. Bone will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on March 7 at 6 p.m.

Tragic Songs

By Anne Delana Reeves

February 22, 2012

February 22, 2012 A Country Music Hall of Fame inductee and a Grand Ole Opry member from 1955 until his death last year at age 83, Charlie Louvin worked as a musician for six decades; Ira, the elder of the duo known as the Louvin Brothers, died in an automobile accident in 1965. The great bulk of Satan Is Real, Charlie Louvin’s posthumously published autobiography, tells the story of their lives and legendary career together. Wistful at times, the book is not without humor, a heavy shake of salty language, and fascinating anecdotes from life on the road.

Fighting a Monstrous Injustice

By Chris Scott

February 21, 2012

February 21, 2012 As a young man in frontier Illinois, Abraham Lincoln became convinced that slavery was wrong. How to end the injustice, and whether to treat the former slaves as equal citizens, were questions Lincoln wrestled with for most of his life. These struggles are the subject of Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. On February 23 at 6:30 p.m., Foner will give the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History in the UC Theater at the University of Memphis.

First-Person Superlative

By Margaret Renkl

February 16, 2012

February 16, 2012 update John Jeremiah Sullivan, a Sewanee grad, has somehow created for himself what can only be called the best writing job in the whole world. Magazines like GQ and Harper’s and The Paris Review and the Oxford American send him out to report on all manner of subjects high and low: cave paintings on the Cumberland Plateau, the grotesque celebrity afterlife of Real World stars, Christian-rock concerts, the waning days of the last living Fugitive, scientific opinion about the future of the human race. Sullivan does more than merely report on what he finds, and does more than merely tell the story in an outrageously original way that involves a page-to-out-loud-laughter ratio of something like 1:1. He also manages the kind of alchemy that all great writing ultimately achieves: John Jeremiah Sullivan transforms every subject he writes about into himself, and himself into the subject, and somehow the reader, too, gets transformed along the way.

The Search for Meaning

By Beth Waltemath

February 16, 2012

February 16, 2012 For Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University professors who have collaborated on a new book called The Meaning of the Bible, “the Bible is not a book of answers. It may be, however, a book that helps its readers ask the right questions, and then provides materials that can spark diverse answers.”

Critical Reading

By Paul V. Griffith

February 10, 2012

February 10, 2011 According to John Kaltner, most Americans have no idea what’s in the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred text. That doesn’t stop many of them from having an opinion, however. The Muslim faith is regularly denigrated as inherently sexist, violent, and inflexible. In an effort to correct such misunderstandings, Kaltner, a professor of Muslim-Christian relations at Rhodes College in Memphis, has written Introducing the Qur’an for Today’s Reader, a critical reading of the Qur’an that focuses on some of the text’s more controversial themes.