“In my younger and more vulnerable years” are the words with which narrator Nick Carraway kicks off “The Great Gatsby.” Those seven words entranced me when I first read “Gatsby,” living then in my own younger and vulnerable days as a 20-something whose heroes were writers, most of them American, most of them male. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe: that was my triumvirate, with dozens of other novelists and poets sitting just below the salt at the same table. 

Several years had passed since I’d last hunted with any enthusiasm. I’d go out into the field, find some game, and take home a few trophies, but the old thrill, that sense of anticipation and joy, had gone missing in action. I began to suspect my days of excitement and pleasure while on the hunt were at an end. 

A friend of mine suggested “Wild Swans” (Simon & Schuster, Reprint Edition, 2003, 538 pages) and to say it did not disappoint would be an understatement. This family history is written by Jung Chang, who recounts the lives of her grandmother, mother and finally herself. 

Eddie Huffman will share his new book, “Doc Watson: A Life in Music.” and also be accompanied by musician Jerad Davis at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 27, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. 

Smokies Life has announced the publication of “George Masa: A Life Reimagined,” the first comprehensively researched biography of the visionary Japanese photographer whose dedication to art and conservation helped spur the national park movement in the Great Smoky Mountains, as well as the creation of the Appalachian Trail. 

Born of the same generation but in different parts of the country, Jane Sherron De Hart and Ruth Bader Ginsburg traveled on oddly similar parallel paths. Those paths would eventually cross as De Hart’s 15 years worth of research on the Supreme Court Justice recently became the most comprehensive biography of Ginsburg’s life and law career.

“That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.”

— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XL