Nonfiction

September 8, 2010 If Thomas R. Flagel’s The History Buff’s Guide to the Civil War is any indication, the use of top-ten lists can be an effective way to teach history. Flagel, an instructor in the history department at Columbia State Community College, has developed a successful franchise in best-of lists, and the newly revised edition of the founding book of his series is a sound and entertaining guide to a world not as distant as the years might suggest. Thomas R. Flagel appears at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on September 10 at 7 p.m.

September 1, 2010 In 1999, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother named Cynthia Stewart took a few pictures of her eight-year-old daughter playing in the bathtub, little knowing that they would lead to her indictment on child-pornography charges. In Framing Innocence, author Lynn Powell tells the story of Cynthia Stewart’s ordeal—and of the community that came to her defense.

August 31, 2010 In Reconstructing Appalachia: the Civil War’s Aftermath, editor Andrew L. Slap pulls together scholarly essays that expand understanding of the mountain South, especially in relation to the turbulent years of Reconstruction.

August 30, 2010 In college, Rachel Held Evans had a crisis of faith: how, she wondered, can a loving god commit non-believers to hell? Can a scientifically and historically inaccurate Bible still be inerrant? How can a god of mercy allow poverty and injustice? Evans’s battle with such hermeneutical hobgoblins is the subject of Evolving in Monkey Town, an account of her eventual rejection of fundamentalist theology in favor of a faith that questions more than it answers. As Evans becomes increasingly uncomfortable with pat responses—that God’s ways are inscrutable, for example—she learns that belief must adapt and change in order to survive.

August 25, 2010 Since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976, Tennessee has executed only six people. That’s far less than most Southern states but far too many for the essayists in Tennessee’s New Abolitionists, which seeks to explode the myth of retributive justice and expose the state’s uneven application of capital-sentencing law. In this collection, editors Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver present a wide range of articles that tell the story of a passionate minority at odds with a political Goliath backed by a largely unreflective mainstream. Sayward discusses and signs Tennessee’s New Abolitionists at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on August 26 at 7 p.m.

August 24, 2010 Like so many other young men of the Victorian era, Frank Lenz, a clerk from Pittsburgh, wished to make his mark on what was still a largely unexplored world. Lenz was a first-class bicyclist, and in that pre-automobile age, first-class cyclists were celebrities. It didn’t take Lenz long to realize he could trade that celebrity for lasting fame—if he were willing to take a calculated risk. In his new book The Lost Cyclist, bicycle historian David V. Herlihy recounts Lenz’s big gamble and the great adventure that cost him his life. Herlihy will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on August 25 at 7 p.m. and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on September 25 at 1 p.m.