By Liz Garrigan, CHAPTER 16 In a brutal but fabulously entertaining essay in The New York Times, Neil Genzlinger recently argued that the memoir genre is out of control, that the paper mountain of unremarkable narratives by mediocre writers must be stopped, stat. “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting...
By Liz Garrigan, CHAPTER 16 If all you knew about the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) was its name, you might conjure a group of retired English teachers, and a few of their librarian friends, circa 1960, alternately talking and knitting on the front porch over tea and scones, fretting about that new sign...
By Liz Garrigan, CHAPTER 16 It was hardly predictable that Matthew Gavin Frank, a child of the Chicago suburbs who grew up on nuked bacon and boiled beef ribs, would go on to become a line cook and caterer in places as varied as Juneau, Alaska, and Key West, Florida. Of course, as Frank...
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE Every good magazine editor gets fired from a job at one point in his career. When it happened to Eric Pooley, managing editor of Fortune at the time, he seized the opportunity to launch a book to chronicle the war on climate change.
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE Fathers don’t so much have to earn the love of sons as just accept it. That’s the lesson of Rick Bragg’s third book about his family, this one exploring the complicated and volatile relationship he had with his handsome, hard-drinking, self-destructive dad and now the one with his stepson.
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE We all know a Peter Russell—the solid, relatively successful guy with moderate good looks but no particular star quality. The pleasant but forgettable fellow at the wedding reception awkwardly wearing rented shoes. The guy who is to dating life what Bill Pullman is to Hollywood.
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE If you like crack fiction, put Hold Tight in your pipe and smoke it. Cormac McCarthy he’s not, but Harlan Coben won’t make you cry yourself to sleep, either. His genius is in conceiving and crafting masterful thrillers whose perfect pace and sequencing leave readers all but breathless.
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE It might be hard to imagine a book that reads, both thematically and in some cases stylistically, like a marriage of Leo Tolstoy and Michael Connelly. But Kip Gayden’s Miscarriage of Justice begins just 22 years after Anna Karenina was published and chronicles a brutal true crime.
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE It's a Friday afternoon, and there's a fleet of managers, photographers, nannies, journalists, a makeup artist and construction workers milling in and out of Amy Grant and Vince Gill's home. Halloween decorations adorn the front porch, and the family dogs Skittles and Chester hold court wherever they please.
By Liz Garrigan, NASHVILLE SCENE Part memoir, part homage to the intimate, unforgettable community of a neighborhood watering hole, journalist J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar (Hyperion, 432 pp., $14.95) recounts a life whose most landmark moments are remembered from a bar stool.
