Nonfiction

August 6, 2012 In Intrepid Aviators, Memphis attorney Gregory G. Fletcher focuses on the Pacific during World War II, providing background details about ships, planes, commanders, and battles. His particular interest, however, is the story of the carrier Intrepid, including a detailed treatment of the torpedo bombers in Squadron 18 and a very personal look at the experiences of his father, Willard Fletcher, one of Squadron 18’s pilots. Will Fletcher launched one of the torpedoes that doomed the huge Musashi battleship. His plane was shot down, and his two crew members were lost, but he managed to survive a harrowing adventure.

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.