Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you’ve sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from the ceiling and whipping you until the blood runs then rubbing salt into the cuts. Imagine having to set out on your own into a terror-filled world when you’re six years old. For Shelley Stewart, these were just the opening blows in a life that is all the more inspiring because of the horrors that set it in motion. He shares his experiences in a new memoir, The Road South, which he co-wrote with Nathan Hale Turner Jr.

Born in the Rosedale section of Birmingham, Alabama, Stewart had little going for him at first beyond the ability to read well and a sense of compassion that kept him from turning mean and bitter. Living where he could including a brief but idyllic residence with a white family Stewart managed to stay in school, reunite with the brothers from whom he had been separated following his mother’s death and lay the foundation for a successful career in radio. In the pursuit of that career, Stewart became a vocal champion for civil rights and a friend of such musical up-and-comers as Otis Redding, Gladys Knight and Isaac Hayes. Now the owner of Birmingham radio station WATV and vice chairman of one of the largest marketing and public relations companies in the South, Stewart recently retired from half a century of being on the air. Except for a few eye-opening weeks in New York City after high school, a disheartening stint in the Air Force and brief professional forays into St. Louis and Nashville, Stewart has remained a resident in the city of his birth.

"I don’t have any psychological residues from the past,"  Stewart says, speaking by phone from his office in Birmingham. But then he amends this assertion by admitting that he has developed an aversion to certain fashionable excuses for failure. "Abuse, race, homelessness,"  he says, ticking them off one by one. "I realized I had gone through every darn one of those categories."  While he speaks with quiet confidence, his voice has none of that unctuous, overbearing tone that so often afflicts the self-made. In fact, there are moments when he seems truly astounded that his life has turned out so well.

Stewart says he began talking openly about his background in the early ’90s after he was invited to speak at a Birmingham high school. On his way to the auditorium, he overheard a student remark, "Look at him. He’s from a bigshot family, and he’s come here to tell us something."  Instead of giving his prepared speech, Stewart looked out at the skeptical faces and began talking about his past.

"I didn’t write The Road South for anything more than to help and inspire others,"  he says. "If just sharing my experiences matters that you don’t have to hate, that you don’t have to give up, that you have to respect and love yourself, that you must be educated in order to communicate with others then maybe [the book] won’t be in vain."

Stewart credits his first grade teacher, Mamie Foster, with endowing him with the self-worth that kept him going through the darkest times. "She pulled me to the side,"  he recalls,  "and said, ‘There’s something different about you. You can do anything you want. Just continue learning.’ " Despite doggedly following her advice, Stewart was heartbroken when his high school principal failed to recommend him for a college scholarship, even though he had top grades. Many years later, though, Miles College corrected this injustice by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Even when the worst abuses were behind him, Stewart’s road remained bumpy. Becoming a popular disc jockey with both white and black fan clubs did not shield him from the racism institutionalized in the radio stations where he worked. His marriages never lived up to his hopes. His brothers never put into practice the examples of thrift, hard work and self-improvement he set for them. Most disappointing, he confesses in the book, was his inability to create the kind of warm and close-knit family he longed for as a boy.

"I still drive back into Rosedale now and then,"  Stewart says.  "As a matter of fact, I’ll be doing a book signing in a store that’s located 200 yards from where my mother was killed."  Sixty-three years past that awful event, the author says he remains upbeat and committed to the benefits of interdependence.  "I can’t help myself without helping someone else,"  he insists. "That will be my belief as long as I live."

During the dog days of last summer, as the national press corps went baying after the elusive Gary Condit, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece called "A Memo from Osama." Entertaining, ironic and caustic in the same instant, the "memo" warned of the consequences of a U.S. failure to respond to "the threat that already exists." The name of that threat, unfamiliar to most Americans at the time, would become a household word in a few short months.

After the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, this and several other pre-9/11 columns included in Friedman’s new book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After Sept. 11, seem shockingly clear-sighted and prescient. They offer glimpses into the future that seem to surprise even Friedman himself. "Man," he says, sounding bemused, "there are lines in those columns that are prophetic. In terms of what happened, I was paying attention."

Since Sept. 11, as regular readers of his twice-weekly column know, Friedman has, if anything, been paying even closer attention. "I’ve been on a really unique journey," he says. "I’ve been to Pakistan twice, to Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel."

Probably no one else—journalist or diplomat—has pursued the complex threads of this story as relentlessly as Friedman. In fact, when we speak by phone, Friedman has just returned from Tehran, Iran, where he was exploring one of the recurring themes of this collection—the need to wage and support a war of ideas in the Arab Muslim world.

"I really try to get the point across that when we start calling people the ‘Axis of Evil,’ we miss the complexity of these societies and the number of potential partners we have inside these societies who share our world view," he says."We have to make sure we’re inviting these people into our future. Ideas matter. We can kill bin Laden, but somebody’s got to kill bin Ladenism. Somebody’s got to kill the ideas that not only nurture him, but create an environment in which so many people tacitly support him. We can help, but ultimately the Arab Muslim world has to do that itself."

As a result of such views—as well as his years of experience in the Middle East, first as a reporter for UPI and then for The New York Times—Friedman "gets a huge amount of email from the Arab Muslim world." Parts of those messages he reprints in the third section of Longitudes and Attitudes. That section is comprised of a series of diaries he kept between September 2001 and June 2002. The diaries make for fascinating reading because they contain anecdotes and analysis Friedman was unable to include in his regular columns, offering a behind-the-scenes look at issues Friedman is writing about and personalities he meets.

One of the surprises in these diaries is how many of Friedman’s contacts and correspondents are Muslim women. Another is the pointed description of a little power play by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that very nearly leaves Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Friedman stranded at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Still another is an eye-opening portrait of the new Russia.

But most interesting of all—in the diaries and in the collected post-Sept. 11 columns that form the bulk of this book—is Friedman’s probing examination of Saudi Arabia. Probably the most important question motivating Friedman’s unique journey during the last nine months has been why 15 young Saudis were involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

"The Arab Muslim world is going through a hard time," he says, "and I have a lot of sympathy for them. They’re struggling with, and in some cases failing at, modernization. That’s because of three deficits that have been building up there for more than 50 years. I’m quoting here from a U.N. study that’s just come out that says it’s a deficit of freedom, it’s a deficit of education and it’s a deficit of women’s empowerment. Thanks to these three deficits they’ve dug themselves a really deep hole."

The dark side of all this, Friedman writes in his diaries, is that it leads to what he calls the "Circle of bin Ladenism, which is made up of three components: antidemocratic leaders, who empower antimodernist Moslem religious educators to gain legitimacy, who then produce a generation of young people who have not been educated in ways that enable them to flourish in the modern world."

Opinions like this—and equally direct criticism of actions by President Bush, Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat—have earned Friedman some powerful detractors. About this, Friedman is philosophical: "Being a columnist is not a friend growth industry. If you’re going to do this job, you have to pull the trigger on people, sometimes on people you like. If you’re not ready to do that, readers can smell it at a hundred paces. . . . A column is like currency, and you can really debase your own currency. I guard zealously the integrity and quality of the column every bit as much as the secretary of treasury does the integrity and quality of the U.S. dollar."

So while his critics may have grown more vociferous, Friedman’s popularity has also grown and changed since Sept. 11. "Before 9/11 the CEO read me; now his secretary reads me, too," he says. "Twice I’ve had bicycle delivery boys stop me on the street in Washington and comment on something they’ve read in my column. . . . This is not in any way exclusive to me. After 9/11, Americans understand that foreign policy is now a real life-or-death matter. It’s about the world their kids are going to grow up in, and as a result, they want to know what’s going on."

And, according to Friedman, what’s going on remains pretty dark. In his first column after Sept. 11, 2001, Friedman called the attacks the beginning of World War III. Although personally an "innate optimist who is constantly looking for solutions," Friedman stands by his initial assessment.

"Some big events, over time, end up being smaller than they first seem," he says. "My view is that 9/11 will turn out to have been bigger than it first seemed and it seemed—pretty big to begin with. It is a huge event in terms of the degree to which it will change our habits, our politics, international relations and the long-term internal discussion in the Arab Muslim world. As I say in the diaries, on 9/11 a wall of civilization was breached that we could not imagine would ever be breached. And the long-term implications of that are just enormous."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

“I can not live without books,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote. Avid readers Sara Nelson, Nancy Pearl and Michael Dirda happily share the celebrated statesman’s sentiment. From tales of childhood to thoughts on Tolstoy and Twain, a trio of new books by these literature lovers reflects the perks and quirks of their page-turning obsession. Recreation for some, therapy for others, books can enrapture, enrage, envelop and amaze as these talented authors demonstrate.

“Books get to me personally,” says New York Observer publishing columnist and self-proclaimed readaholic Sara Nelson. “When things go right, I read. When things go wrong, I read more.” In her new book, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (Putnam, $22.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0399150838), Nelson takes the reader along for a year’s worth of literature and life, offering funny, wise commentary on the ways in which the two intersect. Nelson, who had originally intended to select 52 books for 52 weeks of reading, says her plan fell apart almost immediately. “In reading, as in life, even if you know what you’re doing, you really kind of don’t,” she says. In week one, she set out to read Ted Heller’s Funnymen, a book about stand-up comics, while staying in a Vermont home once owned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But Heller’s gags didn’t play well in the snowy, somber setting, says Nelson. From that point forward, she says, books seemed to choose her as much as she chose them. So Many Books, So Little Time is jam-packed with memorable moments, including the unlikely writing lessons gleaned from culinary bad boy and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Perhaps most memorable of all are Nelson’s musings on a reader’s right to stop reading a book he or she doesn’t like: “It’s the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion,” says the author. “The moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.'” For the record: Nelson now allows herself to toss disappointing tomes at page 20 or 200.

For many, reading is escapism. For writer and Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, books were nothing short of salvation. Raised in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Detroit, Pearl says her family defined dysfunction long before the label came to be. “All I knew then was that I was deeply and fatally unhappy,” says Pearl, author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason. During childhood and early adolescence, Pearl sought refuge at the Parkman Branch Library, where friendly librarians introduced her to books resonating with realities far brighter than her own. “It is not too much an exaggeration if it’s one at all to say that reading saved my life,” she says. Providing recommendations and revelations for more than 100 categories of books, from “Road Novels” and “Russian Heavies” to “Fabulous First Lines” and “Food for Thought,” Pearl’s approach is direct. The author of several professional books for librarians, including Now Read This, she highlights some of her favorite scribes in the category “Too Good to Miss,” offering an eclectic assortment of authors, including Robert Heinlein and Jonathan Lethem. With its short, snappy chapters, Book Lust is a must for any serious reader’s bedside table, a literary nightcap sure to prompt sweet dreams. “All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book,” lamented steelworker Eugene Dirda about his son Michael, a shy, bespectacled boy who preferred the pages of Thoreau to dating or sports. From humble beginnings in the Ohio rust belt town of Lorain to a top post at one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, Dirda’s world has always percolated with words. Both witty and wistful, An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (Norton, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0393057569) pays homage to a bookish youth spent in small-town America. Woven throughout the text are references to books and authors who inspired, intrigued and rankled Dirda, who is now Senior Editor for The Washington Post Book World.

Dirda gives a grateful nod to the educators and friends who influenced him in his early adult years. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist also makes peace with the man he considered impossible to please: “I forgave my father everything: He could be overbearing and worse, but his soul-deadening labor gave me the time to read and to know that my life would be privileged compared to his.” Books, it seems, can also offer redemption. Allison Block writes from La Jolla, California.

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day’s horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley says during a call to her home outside of Monterey, California, where she has lived since moving from the Midwest in 1996 with her then husband and her children. My response was to take some time off and read novels that had come before. She started with The Tale of Genji, a novel written in 11th-century Japan by a woman of the Heian court, Murasaki Shikibu.

"I did it as a form of escape," Smiley says. "But serious novels don’t allow you to escape; instead they ask you to reconsider what you were thinking about in a new way. I found it incredibly efficacious to read The Tale of Genji within a few weeks of the World Trade Center attacks." Indeed, Smiley found the exercise so helpful that she decided to keep going. "By the time I had read a couple more novels, I thought, boy, I should keep track of this and start thinking about this as a project."

Smiley’s project became to read 100 novels that more or less spanned the history of novel writing. "I immediately realized that I was not qualified and also didn’t care to compile a One Hundred Best Novels list. What I really wanted to see was what a given 100 novels some of them famous, some of them obscure, some of them congenial, some of them uncongenial would teach me about the nature of the novel, so I let the list be constructed in a serendipitous way."

The result of Smiley’s reading and thinking is the astonishing Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a book that is interesting, provocative and insightful in so many ways that it is impossible to name or catalog them all. But, at the very least, even the most casual novel-reader is certain to find pleasure in dipping at random into Smiley’s 13th and final chapter in which she writes brief, knowledgeable, sometimes funny, often surprising essays on each of the 100 books she read.

"Certain books on the list really were revelations to me," Smiley says. "I loved them in every way and they were books that I hadn’t known of before. One of them was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, which was a great favorite of Charles Dickens. Another was Justine by the Marquis de Sade. It’s so much more interesting than you think it’s going to be. Yes, it’s pornographic but it’s also a political treatise. It’s fascinating politically; it’s fascinating artistically. I really enjoyed it, though I was shocked by it. And I thought The Once and Future King by T.H. White was a wonderful, wonderful book that ought to be revived."

In the other chapters of the book, Smiley explores with compelling energy what a novel is (answer, in brief: a lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist) and who a novelist is (to begin with, a reader). She examines the history, psychology, morality and art of the novel; its blend of narrative forms and its relationship to human history. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel also includes two brilliant chapters of advice for novel writers, three if you include her case history of the composition, publication and public reception of Good Faith, which she began working on again as her novel-reading project progressed.

Smiley, who is best-known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres and for Moo, her send-up of life at a large Midwestern university, is remarkably perceptive and generous in her views of other writers’ work. She doesn’t, for example, write about good and bad writers, but instead about congenial and uncongenial writers.

"All relationships that you have with authors are essentially instinctive," Smiley says in conversation. "They are forms of friendship or kinship that are based on something not quite conscious, some instinctive response to some quality of that person’s sensibility. Since reading a novel is essentially a private experience, who am I to say that while I love The Once and Future King and you love Ulysses, you’re wrong and I’m right?"

Which is not to say that Smiley avoids offering opinions on who she finds congenial (surprisingly, Daniel Defoe) and why (to oversimplify, because he was so adept at going from the practical to the spiritual and entering the consciousness of so many different types of characters) and who she finds less than congenial (Henry James, because "he thought he was the boss of his characters and his job was to control and dominate them.").

And while the book is in no way autobiographical, Smiley infuses it with the full range of her sensibilities -her concern for the craftsmanship of the novel, her politics, psychological insight and moral vision, and her aesthetic concerns, for example – the core values, so to speak, of who she is as a writer.

Ultimately the views that Smiley expresses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel offer readers and writers alike a path to liberation, primarily because Smiley believes there is no such thing as the perfect novel. "Every artistic form tends in one direction or another," Smiley says, "and the novel tends toward excess, toward compendiousness, toward being about everything. And excess and perfection don’t mix." Which of course means there’s room in the world for all kinds of novels.

More importantly, Smiley thinks that the novel remains central to democratic Western society. "You cannot read a novel and have an opinion about it without feeling yourself free and also as having a right to your own opinion," she says. "So I feel that the novel has radically democratized Western consciousness simply by giving us the opportunity in our own bedroom to say, oh, I agree with this. And I don’t agree with that." Remember that the next time someone asks you why you’re wasting your time with a novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.