A Story that Bears Retelling
April 12, 2016 In Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, the audaciously gifted Tom Bissell merges travel narrative, popular history, and literary criticism to examine the evolution of Christianity from its early years to the present. Bissell will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 14, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
March 30, 2016 In Nation on the Take, investigative journalists Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman make an overwhelming case that money is polluting government and buying not just influence but legislation favorable to, and sometimes written by, special interests.
March 29, 2016 Written from a perspective shaped by a passionate, unorthodox sympathy for dogs, Vanderbilt University professor Colin Dayan’s With Dogs at the Edge of Life explores the troubling contradictions in the human-canine relationship.
March 24, 2016 Alan Taylor won the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes in History for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. On March 31, 2016, at 6 p.m. at the University Center Theatre on the campus of the University of Memphis, Taylor will deliver the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History on the subject of “The Economy of Violence: The American Revolution in the South.”
March 21, 2016 Reading Julian Barnes is a paradoxical pleasure: the author makes clear, in book after book, that literature provides no reassurances, no uncanny access to wisdom or happiness, no affirmation to troubled readers—and yet the experience of reading his work is strangely comforting. Now seventy, Barnes keeps exploring profound questions and continues to produce brilliantly conflicting answers. He will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Hall in Nashville on March 23, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.