Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads by Gary Greenberg is a convenient little volume that seeks to answer the question well known to all new fathers: “What do I do with this ?” Combining humor and helpful advice with rich illustrations by Jeannie Hayden, Be Prepared offers welcome relief for the anxious dad. The information is solid and thorough, vetted by pediatricians and parenting experts, as well as experienced fathers. The tone is light and fun, divided like baby food into easily digestible bits, while the topics cover every concern from teething to understanding the difficulties (both physical and emotional) that the new mother is facing. (If only this book had been available nine years ago when this young father needed to be prepared!) Howard Shirley is a writer and father in Nashville.

Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads by Gary Greenberg is a convenient little volume that seeks to answer the question well known to all new fathers: "What do I do with this ?" Combining humor and helpful advice with rich illustrations by Jeannie…
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Dads of all ages will laugh in agreement at the predicaments in How Tough Could It Be? The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad. With humor in his pen and one hand on a mop, Sports Illustrated writer Austin Murphy shares his experiences as he swaps roles with his wife for six months. How does a man go from interviewing superstar athletes to planning the elementary school talent show? Or more specifically, how does he survive it? There is both insight and laughter in Murphy’s answer, making this book entertaining for both fathers and mothers alike.

Howard Shirley is a writer and father in Nashville.

Dads of all ages will laugh in agreement at the predicaments in How Tough Could It Be? The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad. With humor in his pen and one hand on a mop, Sports Illustrated writer Austin Murphy shares his…
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No longer young, Bruce Stutz undergoes risky heart surgery which leaves him in the depths of post-operative depression, something physicians call pumphead when their patients aren’t listening. He wakes up strangling on a breathing tube. His hospital roommate screams to be taken to the animal hospital. Welcome to aging. In just a few pages of Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season, Stutz somehow captures the whole experience of sickness and hospitalization the disenchantment with humanity, the loss of confidence in the future, the sense that the party is over and it’s all downhill from here. But Stutz doesn’t settle into his rocker and start decaying, he fights for his recovery. Not so much a physical recovery, which has been more or less secured by successful surgery, but a spiritual recovery. What’s the cure for spiritual winter? Spring, of course. So Stutz sets out to experience spring its symbols, indicators and rituals. He begins in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of the famed groundhog oracle. Next stop is a rural Mardi Gras celebration in which local Cajuns start drinking and chasing chickens at around 10 in the morning. In a vintage Chevrolet Impala, a fit companion and analogue for our hero himself, he chases frogs, salamanders, morels and caribou in a trip that spans the North American continent. Stutz chases not only an ever-changing horizon, he also tracks scientists who can show him the biological meaning of spring. From West Virginia to Arizona, Montana, Oregon and Alaska, he pursues the magical chemistry of warmth and light, the mystical parents of life itself. Stutz’s journey ends in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. With 96 hours of unbroken daylight, Stutz swears the wildflowers are actually blossoming before his eyes. And, at this point in the story, the reader notices something. Stutz’s style now reflects the awe and reverence he feels in the presence of life’s raw force. He’s drunk on spring. In his own words, I’ve begun to identify my existence with that of the season’s, imagining that all of spring’s transformations, enticements, multivarious sensual and fragile beauties (for which I’ve been an obsequious sucker) have all been proffered for my benefit. . . . I’ve fallen in love with the spring of my own being.

No longer young, Bruce Stutz undergoes risky heart surgery which leaves him in the depths of post-operative depression, something physicians call pumphead when their patients aren't listening. He wakes up strangling on a breathing tube. His hospital roommate screams to be taken to the…
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In his engrossing new book, award-winning historian Alan Taylor masterfully explores the transition of the borderland of Iroquoia, an alliance of Native American groups called the Six Nations, into two bordered lands which became the state of New York in the American republic and the province of Upper Canada in the British Empire. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution offers a panoramic view of events from multiple perspectives over a period of 50 years. Throughout the painful, and, for many, tragic process including war, diplomacy, broken treaties and promises, land speculation, greed and opportunism the Indians become divided among themselves and devalued as human beings by others. Taylor, recipient of both the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for Mr. Cooper’s Town, explains in extensive detail what lay behind Westward expansion and the settlement of the frontier.

At the heart of this narrative are Joseph Brant, a Mohawk Indian, and Samuel Kirkland, a clergyman’s son, whose 50-year link began in 1761 at a colonial boarding school. It was intended that the boys would become teachers and missionaries to the Indians. However, these one-time friends became bitingly hostile opponents: Brant siding with the British, Kirkland with the revolutionary colonists. Brant sought to help the Indians as he, at least for a while, moved nimbly and with great influence and power between the two cultures. Kirkland also tried to help the Indians, then left to join the rebelling colonists, returning to the Indians late in life. Both men profited handsomely from being able to bridge the cultures.

Taylor also gives us carefully drawn portraits of many other prominent personalities, including the Seneca chief Red Jacket, who was an extraordinary negotiator, and George Clinton, who dominated New York’s politics from 1777 to 1795 and was primarily responsible for the massive transfer of Iroquois lands into state possession for sale and settlement.

Taylor shows that the Indian leaders, with foresight, chose to manage settlement by leasing land rather than selling it. However, a so-called preemption right, by which state and colonial leaders declared imminent and inevitable their acquisition of Indian land, diminishing aboriginal title to a temporary possession, accomplished the objectives of dispossessing the Indians and creating the private property that led to the development of New York in the United States and British interests in Canada. Taylor is concerned about scholars who treat preemption as anything more than a partisan fiction asserted to dispossess native people. Of particular interest to him is the Washington administration’s serious concern about the strength of Indian forces which led to a decision to revise the nation’s frontier policy. The foundation of the new federal policy, passed by Congress and signed by President Washington in July 1790, invalidated any purchase of Indian land, whether by a state or an individual, unless conducted at a treaty council held under federal auspices. The power of The Divided Ground comes from both the accumulation of so much detail from all sides regarding specific events and by the roles played by individual leaders. This is a crucial part of American history that all of us should understand, and Taylor is an excellent teacher.

Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

In his engrossing new book, award-winning historian Alan Taylor masterfully explores the transition of the borderland of Iroquoia, an alliance of Native American groups called the Six Nations, into two bordered lands which became the state of New York in the American republic and the…
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There can hardly be a more frustrating or thankless task than trying to impose a moral code on war, an institution which, by its very nature, feeds on its own excesses. Yet that is the job that A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, undertakes here. Although he cites examples from armed conflicts throughout history, Grayling draws his chief conclusions from the bombings of cities in Europe and Japan during World War II. Grayling first makes it clear that he is not an apologist for Germany or Japan and that they were clearly aggressors who merited being defeated. His moral question is: what did the Allies owe to the innocent civilians of those two nations when it came to planning and carrying out their bombing raids? He is specifically concerned with area bombing, which he defines as the strategy of treating whole cities and the civilian populations as targets for attack by high explosive and incendiary bombs, and in the end by atom bombs. The two great Allied proponents of area bombing were Great Britain’s Sir Arthur Harris and America’s Gen. Curtis E. LeMay. Each, according to Grayling, had an inflated notion of the effectiveness of the technique in winning the war. Their unfortunate laboratories for testing their theories included not only the industrial centers of Berlin and Tokyo but also such targets of questionable military value as Augsburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dresden and Nagasaki. At the beginning of the war, both Germany and Britain went to some lengths to avoid the gratuitous bombing of civilians. But as the conflict heated up and one outrage incited another, the niceties fell away and the rationalizations for indiscriminate slaughter blossomed. (LeMay conceded that had the U.S. lost the war, he might have been indicted as a war criminal.) Beyond the great loss of innocent lives, Grayling points out that the bombings also amounted to culturecide the needless destruction of libraries, schools, churches, monuments and other irreplaceable objects of artistic and historic importance. (To America’s credit, he notes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto, Japan’s cultural center, from the list of cities to be bombed.) In addition to contending that it was morally wrong, Grayling further argues that area bombing was not nearly as militarily effective as its champions insisted it was. He says it didn’t sap the Germans’ will to fight nor break the back of their industrial productivity. Just as it had in Britain, the attacks seemed only to stiffen national resolve and bring out the people’s resilience and ingenuity. According to official estimates, Allied bombing principally by the British killed 305,000 German civilians and injured another 780,000.

The lingering question is: who can punish the victor in war, no matter how flagrant his crime? Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

There can hardly be a more frustrating or thankless task than trying to impose a moral code on war, an institution which, by its very nature, feeds on its own excesses. Yet that is the job that A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the…
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In the shadow of Clinch Mountain in Scott County, Virginia, lies what is called Poor Valley. Out of this hardscrabble environment emerged the legendary musical pioneers the Carter family. A.P. (Alvin Pleasant) Carter, his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle sang and played their way to fame and fortune, creating in many ways the basis for the entire American traditional, folk and country music industries.

In Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, documentary filmmaker Mark Zwonitzer teams up with veteran journalist Charles Hirshberg to capture the historic lives of the Carters, from the moment they were discovered by music producer and publisher Ralph Peer in the 1920s, through their groundbreaking careers as recording artists, to their deaths in the late 1970s. In between is an incredible tale of poverty, sudden celebrity and wealth, seminal recording dates, national radio exposure to a country mired in the Great Depression, unceasing concert performances in towns both small and large, appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and associations with musical greats like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, Roy Acuff and Elvis Presley.

There’s also an interesting profile of the young Johnny Cash, who eventually after a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth became daughter June’s third husband in the 1960s and has kept the family tradition going ever since. This volume is thoroughly researched, and the authors don’t stint on coverage of the Carter forebears, the details of their simple country life and the idiosyncrasies and squabbles that characterized, in particular, the lives of A.P. and Sara, who divorced fairly early on, yet continued working together for the sake of the music (and the money). The text paints intriguing portraits of all the major players but throws rays of especially revelatory light on A.P.’s brother Eck, who was not simply Mother Maybelle’s devoted husband but also a reliable and organized manager for his wife and a loving father to their singing daughters (June, Helen and Anita).

Music fans will be particularly fascinated with accounts of how A.P. in need of recording material scoured the countryside collecting folk and gospel songs from local citizens, tinkered with the words and melodies as necessary and then, innovator that he was (or scoundrel, depending on your point of view), parlayed his finds into copyrightable gems that netted him (and Peer) a king’s ransom in royalties. In the right place at the right time, the Carters brought to the world the spirit of Wildwood Flower, Keep on the Sunny Side and Will the Circle Be Unbroken, among many other classic tunes. This book is an essential work of musical Americana.

Aspiring musician Martin Brady writes on the arts.

In the shadow of Clinch Mountain in Scott County, Virginia, lies what is called Poor Valley. Out of this hardscrabble environment emerged the legendary musical pioneers the Carter family. A.P. (Alvin Pleasant) Carter, his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle sang and played their…

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