October 22, 2013 Richard Schweid, a Nashville native who now lives in Barcelona, has written books on eels and cockroaches, and with Octopus he continues his fascination with the less-cute creatures of the natural world. This lively book introduces readers to a creature who is strange, tasty, and surprisingly intelligent.
October 21, 2014 In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case, historian Michael Ross adapts the genres of true-crime narrative and courtroom drama to recover a forgotten story that captured national attention nearly 150 years ago. In clear, bright prose Ross deftly sorts through the complexities of Reconstruction-era politics to tell the story of two mixed-race women accused of abducting a white toddler. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 28, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
October 17, 2014 Liberal education, argues Michael S. Roth, is a tool that “matters far beyond the university because it increases our capacity to understand the world, contribute to it, and reshape ourselves. When it works, it never ends.” Roth will give a free public lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis on October 23, 2014, at 6 p.m.
Minoa Uffelman
Univ Tennessee Press
371 pages
$34.95
“Nannie’s diary may record only one woman’s experience, but she represents a generation of young women born into a society based on slavery but who faced mature adulthood in an entirely new world of decreasing farm values, increasing industrialization, and young women entering the workforce. Civil War scholars and students alike will learn much from this firsthand account of coming-of-age during the Civil War.”
–From the Publisher
Jennifer Knapp
Howard Books
304 page
$24
“Facing the Music is a fascinating read on so many levels. Knapp is brutally honest about herself, about what she experienced, and what was happening in her head and her heart as she grew in her relationship with music, Christianity, and her sexual orientation. It pulls back the curtain on the Christian music industry to look at the business behind the worship and the squeaky clean image. It’s a story that many of us will be able to relate to, in our own way, and readers of Facing the Music will find not only Knapp’s story, but their own as well.”
–Ross Murray, Director of News, GLAAD
Christina Juris Bennett
Vanderbilt University Press
248 pages
$34.95
“A history of the struggle among competing stakeholders in one of the oldest and most controversial experiments in US health care policy, a precursor to Obamacare. In 1993, Tennessee launched a reform initiative designed to simultaneously expand the proportion of residents with health insurance and curtail cost increases.”
–From the Publisher
