Sara Foster
Random House
416 pages
$35.00
“From squash-threaded hush puppies to brûléed rice pudding, Sarah Foster is a keen synthesizer of Southern genres and geographies. My copy of her latest is already dog-eared and (red-eye) gravy splattered.”
–John T. Edge, series editor of Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing
Sam Pickering
Mercer University Press
276 pages
$25.00
Pickering, an English professor at the University of Connecticut and personal essayist (Waltzing the Magpies; The Best of Pickering; etc.), serves up pedagogical advice couched in folksy language and peppered with personal anecdotes, tall tales and family stories. In 10 letters (on “The Good Teacher,” “Truth,” “Pressure” and more), he ranges over the educational map, considering his education, the schooling of his children, and the middle school and college students he has taught in places as varied as Tennessee, Connecticut, Western Australia and Syria. Modest reflection (“I marvel at how superficial and fragmentary my knowledge seems to be”) coexists with firm suggestions (“Instead of humiliating a child, you should talk to parents, generally the force pressuring a child to cheat”) amid discussions of the practical matters of teaching (handling committee work, dealing with grade pressure, testing, preparing assignments, mentoring). Education controversies are mentioned gently (“The effects of classroom doings are always mysterious, something that should be pounded, intellectually of course, into every legislator in the nation”) and sacred cows sometimes tipped (“question the emphasis education puts on writing,” he says). Pickering’s odd timelessness—his ideas seem simultaneously old-fashioned and up-to-date—and his warm wisdom (and occasional iconoclasm) will please educators and interested lay readers alike.)
—Publishers Weekly (About Letters to a Teacher
May 4, 2011 In 1933, by the time William Dodd arrived in Berlin with his wife and two grown children, the country he had loved as a university student was almost completely gone. As was the case with most foreign observers in the early days of Hitler’s Germany, it was not immediately obvious to Dodd that anything was amiss, but as Erik Larson demonstrates in his captivating new book, Dodd would spend his four-year term as ambassador trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Larson will discuss and sign In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin at the Nashville Public Library on May 10 at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series.
May 3, 2011 In her new book, Gone: A Photographic Plea for Preservation, architect and photographer Nell Dickerson teams up with the late Shelby Foote, her cousin by marriage, to offer two intertwining tales of a disappearing South. The first is a Foote novella that recounts the loss of historic structures to the torches of Union soldiers during the Civil War nearly 150 years ago. The second is the story told through Dickerson’s images, which document the neglect, poverty, and apathy that have caused the disappearance of so many historic buildings since the war. Nell Dickerson will discuss Gone: A Photographic Plea for Presentation at DK Booksellers in Memphis on May 7 at 1 p.m.
April 29, 2011 On myriad motherhood subjects—think sanctimommies, sex after baby, the challenges of monogamy, and an endless stream of dirty socks—Kyran Pittman is an eminently quotable writer with a sharp wit, a kind of David Sedaris for modern breeders. To read her memoir-in-essays, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life, is to want to copy and paste sentences and whole passages repeatedly into emails to your mom pals. In these essays, Pittman’s quippy, often self-deprecating humor makes for a lively read as she simply and eloquently homes in on the significance of universal domestic ups and downs. Pittman will read from Planting Dandelions at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on May 5 at 5:30 p.m.
April 27, 2011 During the 1980s and ‘90s, Chattanooga author Erin Tocknell grew up with engaged, responsible parents in an interesting old house in a safe neighborhood in Nashville, where she could afford to be an independent, restless tomboy. She was active in a big-steeple Methodist church and went to magnet schools downtown; in many ways her life seemed idyllic. Only as an adult did she come to recognize the complex social and racial history of the environment she had passed through as a child. Tocknell’s new essay collection, Confederate Streets , recounts this awakening.
