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Articles by Lyda Phillips
Pain and Pure Beauty
Ex-Army CID investigator Mick Hardin is back at it in the Kentucky hills in The Reluctant Sheriff, the fourth installment of Chris Offutt’s popular series. Offutt wastes no time in the opening, as two liquor delivery drivers come across a dead body in the parking lot of a local tavern. This body is only the first to fall. Readers who’ve come to know and love the Mick Hardin novels can safely anticipate that there will be more to follow.
Color Lines
Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, begins with a memory of blue: a missing dropped-ceiling tile in her grandmother’s bedroom reveals a glimpse of the room’s original sky-blue paint. “My blue begins here,” she writes, “inside her-our-my home.” Perry’s grandmother, “a nurturer and a stalwart,” made that house a refuge of love and laughter in Jim Crow Alabama and thereafter.
Walking a Pitch-Dark Road
In his 1991 autobiography, A Season for Justice, the celebrated civil rights lawyer Morris Dees recounted the courtroom battles and close escapes of his career, with a particular focus on his creative legal strategy to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan.
Being There
The ripping pain that assails a mother with a demanding job is constant. Every day she is away from her children, it hurts, writes Mary Louise Kelly in her book It. Goes. So. Fast. The list of lost moments is long: “All those weekly soccer games when I showed up late, or failed to make it altogether. The playdates I skipped, the pool parties that I missed. The school pickups, the chance to hear the chatter from the back seat.
On Account of Sex
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In conjunction with the Tennessee exhibits of Voices and Votes: Democracy in America, Chapter 16 is revisiting coverage of notable books on civil rights and the foundations of a democratic society. This review originally appeared on February 27, 2018.
Trumpeter Swan
According to the notes in my old National Geographic bird guide, on November 8, 1980, I saw a trumpeter swan at the Crabtree Nature Center in Barrington Hills, Illinois. A life bird. Photo: National Park Service My mother had been in the hospital in downtown Chicago for nearly two months. I had been at her side in September when they placed an IV into the vein on the back of her hand, starting the drip that might save her.
Gratitude
When the coronavirus pandemic hit full force in March of 2020, I suspect most of us never thought we'd still be in the midst of it almost two years later, yet here we are. In the face of so much hardship and loss, the disruptions to publishing and literary culture can seem pretty unimportant, but they're of a piece with the struggles we've all been facing, and it's only right to recognize how hard many folks have worked to get books in readers' hands and keep the conversation going.
Winnowing
On November 30, 2020, we sold our house in East Nashville. Now we are embarked on a Great Adventure — driving a Nissan cargo van out to the desert Southwest and then north until we say, “Let’s just go home.” But before we sold the house, I had to winnow the detritus that had piled up over the course of 12 years in the beautiful house we named Agnes as soon we moved in, just days before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.
Wayne Winkler's 'Beyond the Sunset' delves into history of Hancock County Melungeons
Lyda Phillips and Chapter16.org, Special to the News Sentinel Published 5:00 a.m. ET March 6, 2020 Knoxville author and illustrator Shawn Harbin talks about his new comic book, "Transfurred," featuring a 12-year-old transgender detective as the hero.
New book 'Before and After' tells stories of Tennessee Children’s Home Society victims
Lyda Phillips and Chapter16.org, Special to the News Sentinel Published 5:00 a.m. ET Jan. 3, 2020 The horrors of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society — Georgia Tann’s adoption mill that flourished in Memphis from 1924 until Tann’s death in 1950 — are now well known. Less familiar, but equally heartbreaking, are the long searches many of those adoptees have made for their birth families.
'Before and After': Victims of Georgia Tann adoption scandal share stories in new book
Lyda Phillips, Chapter16.org Published 8:00 a.m. CT Nov. 7, 2019 Author Lisa Wingate discusses the significance of being in Memphis with survivors of the Tennessee Children's Home Society adoption scandal. Ron Maxey/The Commercial Appeal The horrors of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society — Georgia Tann’s adoption mill that flourished in Memphis from 1924 until Tann’s death in 1950 — are now well known.
When First Love Could Kill
In 1983 Ronald Reagan was president, Stonewall was ancient history, and AIDS only a rumor of a strange “gay plague.” It was an intoxicating, perilous time to be a teenager in New York, aching for love and freedom. In Helene Dunbar’s latest young adult novel, We Are Lost and Found, Michael, the narrator, and his friends James and Becky struggle to navigate these dangerous waters.
'Wrong About Appalachia': Elizabeth Catte deconstructs views of a misunderstood region
Lyda Phillips and Chapter16.org Special to the Knoxville News Sentinel, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee Aug. 25, 2018, 8:00 a.m. ET In "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia," Elizabeth Catte upends a metropolitan narrative advanced by authors such as J.D. Vance, who paint the vast Appalachian region, stretching from northern Georgia and Alabama to New York, as an entrenched bastion of white rage and dysfunction, the epicenter of Trump Country.
Wrong About Appalachia
In What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte upends a metropolitan narrative advanced by authors such as J.D. Vance, who paint the vast Appalachian region, stretching from northern Georgia and Alabama to New York, as an entrenched bastion of white rage and dysfunction, the epicenter of Trump Country. Catte, a Ph.D. graduate of Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro and a Knoxville native, is a socialist historian in the vein of Howard Zinn.
In 'The Woman’s Hour,' Elaine Weiss dissects battle for women’s right to vote
The long march toward voting rights for women began as early as the 1820s, but it wasn’t formalized as a political goal until 1848 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton read her “Declaration of Sentiments” at the Seneca Falls Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York. In "The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote," Elaine Weiss chronicles the history of that battle beginning with its early days, when Stanton and Susan B.
Mountain Meanderings: Ben Anderson chronicles a year in the Smokies
At 64, Ben Anderson spent the year after his retirement not with his feet up on the porch rail but with his boots on the ground, hiking the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s most rewarding backcountry trails. In his new book, "Smokies Chronicle," he recounts the hikes he made on trails he already knew intimately from more than 20 years as a volunteer custodian of backcountry campsites, cleaning up litter and knocking down illegal fire rings.
Down Low in the Bluff City
Memphis Noir, a new story collection, paints a dark, aching portrait of Memphis, a city steeped in music and magic Memphis Noir, edited by Laureen P. Cantwell and Leonard Gill, captures the subtlety of the Memphis ethos, where blacks and whites, rich and poor, are intimately entwined. The collection—fifteen stories by some of the city’s finest writers—bleeds the blues and calls down the dark powers that permeate this capital of the Delta.
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