WILD RIVER

A kaleidoscopic history-in-vignettes of Memphis, Tennessee.

In her nonfiction debut, DeRossitt looks at Memphis across a broad swath of its history, aiming to give her readers “true tales of the nation’s first truly American city” (a description that will raise eyebrows in Boston and Philadelphia). The author presents a series of historical vignettes, varying in length from a paragraph to a page, that illuminate, in flashbulb moments, all kinds of people in all kinds of situations ranging over more than a century of the city’s history. Most of these vignettes seem to have been chosen for their vividly dramatic nature; in 1915, for instance, Geoffrey Inman, the 27-year-old captain of a steel firefighting boat, was having an affair with a woman named Frances Wilson, who ended up shooting him dead. The trial featured a letter from Inman’s mother: “That woman will kill you and then laugh about it.” Then, there’s 28-year-old Will Latura, who, in 1908, walked into a “negro saloon,” shot four patrons dead, and, while in custody, matter-of-factly said: “I shot ‘em and that’s all there is to it.” At every point in this book’s lengthy text (over 500 pages), DeRossitt includes small personal stories that are immensely engaging in their own right and highlight various aspects of Memphis history, from race relations to women’s rights to the economic growth of the city over the years. The author doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of the city’s racist past—DeRossitt instead balances the ugliness with wonderfully rendered human elements. Her decision to stagger the chronological arrangement of her subjects is at first jarring, but her storytelling talents more than compensate for any disorientation, and the two-steps-forward-one-step-back reading experience that results is probably more involving than a strictly chronological approach would have been.

An odd and wonderfully impressionistic history of Memphis.