Metro Pulse/Cover/Summer Reading Issue

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Voldemore
Harry Potter has captured the minds and wallets of most of the country. This is not a bad thing.

The Mayoral Reader
Hizzoner's tastes run to history and biography

A Literary Thread Runs through It
This year's list from the Taylor Prize screeners

A Community of Books
In which our Pulp lover goes to BEA in L.A. and connects

Opening the 'Dore Record

Ignorance... Not Necessarily Bliss
Recounting a relationship that refuses to resume

Opening the 'Dore Record
A history of sorts

by Barry Henderson

For six months last year and this, Bill Carey was editor of Metro Pulse. When he returned to Nashville in February, his first order of business was to complete his history of his alma mater and get it published.

In release just a few weeks now, Chancellors Commodores & Coeds: A History of Vanderbilt University is Carey's second book. His first, the eminently readable Fortunes, Fiddles, and Fried Chicken: A Business History of Nashville, was published in 2000 and has enjoyed a modest success for a book of its kind.

It should be more popular, given the fascinating turns of events that he describes in a style full of skill and grace. The Vandy history, despite its own share of artfully described episodes, promises to be mostly read by Carey's fellow alumni. But anyone curious about the development of one of the South's premier institutions of higher learning from its origins as a training school for Methodist ministers will learn a lot from Carey's research and his non-academic way of spinning that record.

From his glee in reporting once again that V.U. built the South's first football stadium and dominated that sport in the region for a half-century, to his delineation of the Fugitive poets of the 1920s, to the ambivalence that led into the protest years of the 1960s, he sums up well the Vanderbilt experience.

The book gives homage to the Ingram family, whose $340 million stock gift to the school in the mid-'90s was the largest single gift ever made to a private university (they followed that up with a $56 million gift and help in raising another $100 million for the Vanderbilt Cancer Center, one of the nation's largest comprehensive cancer treatment and research institutions).

Old Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose mid-19th century donation led to the founding of the school, and whose naval title led to the nickname, would be proud to know the heights to which the university has risen. He'd also likely be as pleased as a tight-assed titan of industry could be with Carey's chronicle.