MTSU English professor Jid Lee remembers a Korean childhood marked by violence and despair. Urged to cultivate a warrior spirit but also to accept without question the patriarchy of her culture, Lee was trapped: “I felt I was in a tiger’s stomach. I wanted to get out.” To Kill a Tiger: A Memoir of Korea is the story of her release.
Americans across the political spectrum like to complain about the unchecked power of the Supreme Court. In The Will of the People, former Vanderbilt law professor Barry Friedman offers a meticulously researched account of the Court’s most important decisions, from Marbury v. Madison to Bush v. Gore, and reveals that the public has always had the last word.
Scientists who write are no rarity, but Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams, is virtually unique in combining a significant career as a research scientist with an equally significant career as a writer of literary fiction. Most people experience a certain tension between their logical and affective selves, between cold rationality and a more intuitive, artistic way of interpreting the world, but the Memphis native seems to have escaped that process, giving his intellect free rein in both realms. He is credited with discoveries that have wide application in astronomy and astrophysics, and he has published a dozen books, including several collections of his essays and four bestselling, highly regarded novels.
A century ago, the City of Light went dark as the river Seine overflowed its banks. Memphis professor Jeffrey H. Jackson describes the forgotten Parisian flood of 1910 and the massive human effort required to save the city. Jackson will read at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on January 19 at 6 p.m.; at Vanderbilt University on January 21 at 4 p.m.; and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on January 21 at 7 p.m.
By Kell Black
Running Press
80 pages
$19.95
“When I was five years old, my dad was working at the New York World’s Fair, and he had gone to the Dutch Pavilion and he bought this kit—Make Your Own Medieval Village. One night after supper, we cleared the dining room table and cut everything out and glued everything together. It was like magic. I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do that.’ … After watching him build it, I went out to the driveway and drew our VW bus from all sides on a big sheet of cardboard, cut it out, folded it, then glued it together. I’ve been making things ever since.”
—Kell Black, author of Paper Chess: Create Your Own Chess Set with a Detachable Board and 2 Full Sets of Punch-out Pieces
Alan Lightman has explored the mysteries of both science and spirit in his fiction, taking readers from Einstein’s alternate worlds (Einstein’s Dreams) to a ghostly encounter in a mortuary (Ghost). In Screening Room (due from Pantheon in early 2011), Lightman will venture into his own childhood memories of Memphis during the tumultuous 1950s and 60s: “This book is about Memphis and the South in the 1950s and 1960s; my family and the family movie business; the music, food, and culture of Memphis; racism in Memphis and the South; Boss Crump, Elvis, Martin Luther King, etc.,” he writes. In this excerpt, the opening chapter of the fictionalized memoir, he provides a glimpse—though a child’s innocent eyes—of the old social order of a city poised on the brink of change.
