A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

A Happy Family, Supersized

September 9, 2011 For acclaimed journalist Melissa Fay Greene and her husband, the prospect of being home alone after their four children grew up was not a happy one. No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is Greene’s account of how her family adopted five more children—a son from Bulgaria, and three sons and a daughter from Ethiopia—and found all their lives “enlivened and enriched” in the process. Melissa Fay Greene will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

Always Lefty

August 31, 2011 There are echoes of his voice on the radio today. When Tim McGraw sings—or Willie Nelson, or Merle Haggard—what you’re hearing is the influence of Lefty Frizzell, front and center stage. Little known today, Lefty’s music was simply everywhere in the early 1950s. And his life was filled with as many ups and downs as his loose, turbulent voice. In his new memoir, I Love You A Thousand Ways: The Lefty Frizzell Story, Lefty’s brother David tells the story as he knew it.

Always Lefty

Boogie Chillen'

August 29, 2011 In The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock and Roll, Memphis music writer Preston Lauterbach takes us back before the days when black music had its way with white teenagers; back to a time when Southern black musicians like B. B. King, Little Richard, and Ray Charles depended for their livelihood on the informal yet influential association of rural nightclubs, big city “strolls,” and gangsters-cum-entrepreneurs known as the chitlin’ circuit. Lauterbach will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

Maternal Instincts

August 15, 2011 Six years ago, Florida authorities investigated a child neglect case so vile and gut-wrenching that even an experienced social worker and a cop found themselves vomiting at the scene. In a small house full of filth, barely clothed and confined to a foul closet, was a profoundly neglected six-year-old girl named Dani. Now Nashville author Kay West has written a book about how Diane and Bernie Lierow came to welcome Dani into their family. She recently spoke with Chapter 16 by phone about Dani’s Story.

Maternal Instincts

Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism

Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism

Robert Barsky

The MIT Press
320 pages
$29.95

“Barsky has managed to pull together the strands of a complex life with warmth, humor, and archival research of unusual depth. Harris emerges in this book not only as one of the giants of a golden age for linguistics in the United States, but also as a political activist and thinker of great subtlety. Barsky lucidly explicates Harris’s fearfully complex ideas on language as well as recreates the lively debates and utopian brio of the Zionist organization, Avukah. With this book a new member joins the pantheon of American originals.”

Michael Holquist , Professor of Comparative and Slavic Literature Emeritus, Yale University

No Quitter

Secrets are safe with Shania Twain. The five-time Grammy winner has sold seventy-five million albums, but she has also lived much of her life in silence, fiercely protecting her family’s “painful” and “embarrassing” past from public scrutiny. The decision to divulge some of those secrets in the hope that it might “be of help to others” is what gives her new autobiography, From this Moment On, its remarkable heart.

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