When Jim Ridley died last year at age fifty, he left a legacy of brilliant writing about movies, literature, music, art, and the vibrant life of a growing city. Celebrating that achievement, Vanderbilt University Press has just announced that it will publish an anthology of the late Nashville Scene editor’s most memorable film reviews. Today Chapter 16 talks with Steve Haruch, editor of People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley.
With the White House proposing to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, Chapter 16’s editor looks back at a time when NEH funds rescued writers in Tennessee.
In his 2012 book, The Forest Unseen, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, David George Haskell revealed the web of life hidden within a small circle of old-growth Tennessee forest. His second book, The Songs of Trees, expands that web to the globe itself. Haskell will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 30 at 2 p.m.
Adrienne Berard will discuss Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South at Bookstock, a celebration held at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in Memphis on April 29. Bookstock is held annually and this year will feature appearances by forty area authors, food trucks, live music, and a host of children’s activities, including face painting, arts and crafts, and story time. All events are free and open to the public.
Jim Dickinson’s memoir, I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone, works its way through the musical landscape of rock’n’roll, soul, and the blues—Memphis-style. Mary Lindsay Dickinson will read from her late husband’s book at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 27 at 1 p.m. A musical performance by Some Sons of Mudboy will follow the reading.
Otis Sanford tells a lively history of power and race in From Boss Crump to King Willie, a political history of twentieth-century Memphis, bookended by two towering figures: E.H. Crump and W.W. Herenton.
