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Sharing Good Times is Jimmy Carter’s episodic account of how he has managed to fit fun, family and friends into a life that’s been powered by ambition and inclined toward solitude. It’s not been easy or always successful. As befits his systematic, detail-oriented mind, the former president presents his recollections chronologically, beginning with his earliest memories of tagging along behind his beloved father (“my hero”) and concluding with a fishing trip that he, his wife and their friends took earlier this year to Russia’s wild Kamchatka Peninsula.

Something of a loner since he was a boy, Carter admits that he has “struggled to learn [that some experiences] are more deep and lasting sources of pleasure when they are shared with others.” It is not a lesson he was quick to learn, he concedes. Soon after he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, he married Rosalynn Smith. But even after the young couple begin having children, Carter says his interest in his own career kept him from involving himself in family matters or assuming many domestic responsibilities. “My almost single-minded commitment to my shipboard duties rarely included my wife,” he recalls, “and we seldom took time off for vacations or even overnight or weekend excursions.” The upshot of this “compartmentalized” marriage was that Rosalynn gradually developed a strong sense of independence. She was shattered, then, when Carter announced without so much as alerting her that he was resigning his Navy commission, after 11 years in the service, to take over the family business in Plains, Georgia. “She wept and cajoled,” he says, “but I exerted my dominance as a husband and we closed the door on my naval career and headed back home.” As the children grew older and his wife joined him in handling the business, Carter became more sensitive to the communal aspects of family life and the joys it brought him. There were fishing and camping trips close to home and educational sojourns to Washington, D.C., and Mexico. Competition became the common denominator of all the trips, both then and later. Who would catch the biggest fish? Who would spot the most birds or climb farthest up the mountain? But Carter had not completely rid himself of his lone-wolf tendencies. In 1962, when he decided to run for the Georgia state senate, Rosalynn didn’t find out about it until he was on his way out the door to file the necessary papers. “It is almost incomprehensible now,” he reflects, “but I had never discussed this life-changing decision with her.” However, by the time he was making his successful run for governor in 1970, he had involved virtually every member of his family in the campaign. The same held true five years later when he began his bid for the presidency.

The pressures of the White House caused Carter to savor the company of those close to him even more than he had before. An admitted penny pincher when it came to funding his own family vacations, he was especially smitten by the free luxuries of Camp David. “[A]fter our first visit to Camp David,” he says, “I told my budget director never to inform me what it cost or to suggest that its services be reduced in any way.” Carter’s affectionate descriptions of times spent at the presidential retreat are among the brightest in the book.

Since leaving Washington and establishing the Carter Center in Atlanta, the Carters and their extended family have become inveterate globetrotters. In various configurations, they have scaled Mounts Everest, Fuji and Kilimanjaro (but none all the way); traversed Spain and lingered over its art and architecture; and roamed through the great African game preserves. Experiencing these locales and friends together, Carter assures us, intensified the delight. Even so, he devotes the penultimate chapter to the pleasures of his solitary “hobbies” of writing, painting and woodworking.

Released just in time for the holidays, Carter’s memoir is available in hardcover and in an unabridged audio version read by the former president himself. The one element missing in this richly detailed treatise on family bonding is a real sense of emotional involvement. Carter witnesses, relays and assesses events as a reporter might. Everything’s there but the feeling.

In his new book, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, acclaimed novelist Jonathan Franzen looks back at his childhood and adolescence near Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s. I grew up in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class, he writes.

A brilliantly talented author, Franzen is more aware than most Americans of the ironies of individuality and citizenship. There are many moments here that bring together the individual and group experience of being American, from Franzen’s brother and father fighting over the National Guard shootings at Kent State to the mix of compassion and annoyance experienced by those beseeched for donations in the days following Hurricane Katrina.

Winner of the National Book Award in 2001 for The Corrections, Franzen is perhaps best known for his own discomfort about taking part in Oprah’s TV book club. In his memoir, Franzen’s story moves between his adult life as a relatively famous novelist and his childhood as a nerdy and insecure child and teen. The Discomfort Zone provides page after page of clear-eyed observation and disconcertingly candid emotion. Many readers will identify with the ongoing argument between Franzen’s father and mother over where to set the thermostat in their house, a struggle that gives the book its title.

Sometimes Franzen seems to be galloping off on a tangent, but readers who stay with him will find that he has kept his topic in mind all along. For example, in exploring what he admired about Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, he examines Schulz’s life and the curious way that his cartoons appealed to both squares and hippies in the 1960s. By the time Franzen gets to the kitsch and sentimentality of later Peanuts strips, he has analyzed an era and his own parents. By the time he reaches the end of this book, he has immortalized a country and a family blithely unaware of their own decline.

Michael Sims is the editor of The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel.

In Tattoo for a Slave, 92-year-old novelist Hortense Calisher (A Sunday Jew) renders a personalized history of the last 100 years of the United States. Hailed as a mixture of fiction and autobiography, Calisher’s memoir tells the story of her Southern, Jewish, slave-owning family, beginning with her father’s birth in 1861.

Language, with its potential to be playful, evocative, elusive, nuanced and shocking, is the real star of the book. Calisher’s style has appropriately been compared to that of Vladimir Nabokov; some may also find it reminiscent of John Barth. Calisher hopscotches between memories and related incidents, creating a rich tapestry rather than a driving narrative. The three characters that emerge most vividly are her immigrant mother, her business-tycoon father and her self-engrossed brother. They are distinct individuals, but suggest different facets of the American experience.

Calisher’s mother, Hedwig, represents the survivalism of immigrants: she is unsentimental, opportunistic and contemptuous of the new world in which she finds herself. Calisher’s father, Joe, is the clear hero of the book. Pressured to support a sprawling family, he subordinates his artistic, intellectual interests to become successful in the perfume industry, evincing the classic American tension between culture and commerce. Her brother emerges perhaps the most vividly. He appears to have inherited only the greed and self-absorption of his mother and father with none of their redeeming characteristics. His character points cautiously to the end result of America’s relentless quest for money and personal ease.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Calisher’s portrait of her family and her country is the apparent distance she keeps from her own motherland. She often refers ironically to Amerika, spelled as German immigrants spelled it as if she were describing it from the point of view of a foreigner, rather than someone born in Richmond, Virginia. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.