Life is one long journey, and men and women take different approaches to the adventure. Best-selling author Gail Sheehy takes us along for part of the trip from a man’s point of view, with her new book, Understanding Men’s Passages. Sheehy demonstrates how the trek of life has changed for men in the past few years with the development of new social conditions and medical advances.

“Most men as they approach 40 or later ages will run into passages for which they were never prepared,” writes Sheehy. As traditional roles of men and women become more or less a thing of the past, men find themselves more confused than ever as they approach middle age. Sheehy reveals that the stereotypes of men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are just not accurate anymore. In hundreds of extensive interviews with men from all over the country, men talk about their concerns about the effects of aging: loss of physical stamina, sex drive, prestige. As baby boomers approach “middle age,” Sheehy finds that aside from changes here and there most still consider themselves the same person they were when they were 25 or 30. Interestingly, for those in their 50s, 60s, and beyond, there are ways in which this seems to be true. “Retirement is an obsolete concept for boomers,” reports Sheehy, who talked to a number of men in the midst of post-retirement careers. “Male menopause” is a subject few have dared talk about, but Sheehy forges ahead, prompting discussions on hormone treatments, impotency, virility, family matters, staying active, and examining the comments of men who have experienced this “change of life.” Every reader will gain something from Understanding Men’s Passages; men can see themselves and women can see their husbands, fathers, significant others, and friends. Sheehy’s detailed research and straightforward style helps to unveil this silent topic, and aims to enable men to prepare and endure the passages of life and, hopefully, learn something about themselves in the process.

Reviewed by Paul Ladd.

Kaye Gibbons weaves marvelous prose from the emotional havoc hateful fathers stir in their daughters. But as in Ellen Foster a tour de force told from the perspective of a young girl bounced from one unfit home to the next, who possesses remarkable candor, even humor the daughters in Gibbons’s stories are survivors. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is the story of Emma Garnet Tate, the daughter of Southern plantation owner Samuel P. Tate, “man of means, by God,” who is fighting an eternal battle to overcome his lowly beginnings. A self-made man, he is fiercely jealous of his eldest son’s opportunities. Whately confounds his father by rejecting his future inheritance: “I do not think I will ever live here,” Whately demurs. “If I take up your living, I will take up your Negroes. Thank you though.” Instead, Whately loves literature, a passion he instills also in Emma Garnet, further infuriating their father he craves a daughter with great feminine charms, not the bright and competent young woman Emma Garnet is becoming.

To Tate’s mortification, Emma Garnet marries a young doctor, Quincy Lowell, of a prominent “Yankee” family from Boston. The couple moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Emma Garnet lives with the greatest peace and joy she has ever known for a time.

The Civil War is on the horizon, and the Lowells are in the thick of it. As the bloodshed mounts Emma Garnet joins her husband in the hospital tending to the soldiers and later moves into their home (the piano is Quincy’s impromptu operating table). The Lowell home becomes a tight operation, run by Emma Garnet and Clarice a cherished slave from Emma Garnet’s childhood whom she and Lowell freed and hired for wages. Though common throughout the war, there’s a subtle irony in Clarice’s care of the soldiers who would die for the South’s right to own slaves.

Never melodramatic, the story captures the lie of the war that there’s honor in joining what Emma Garnet sarcastically terms “the chivalric dead.” To a newspaper’s account of a soldier shot by sniper who “no doubt died in regard of his Cause,” Emma Garnet responds, “No doubt he died wishing he was home, thinking Yankees and Negroes might not be worth the exquisite pain in his side . . .” The author of five novels including A Virtuous Woman and A Cure for Dreams, Kay Gibbons has considerable critical acclaim to live up to. In On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, she has exceeded it.

Reviewed by Rosalind S. Fournier.

In the early 1970s, super secret agent Evan Tanner disappeared, not an uncommon fate of international spies in the waning days of the Cold War. Captured by a Swedish militant group (now there’s an oxymoron), Tanner was put in ice; that is to say, cryogenically frozen and buried under a suburban New Jersey house. Tanner’s creator, Lawrence Block, left him there for a quarter of a century, give or take, and in the interim found fame and fortune chronicling the exploits of hard-boiled detective Matthew Scudder and bon vivant burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr.

Now it is 1998, the Cold War is but a distant memory, and by a happy accident Evan Tanner is resurrected. Chronological age: early sixties; apparent age: thirty-something. A lot has changed since the seventies: the advent of the computer age, AIDS, designer drugs, the partitioning of the former Soviet Union. Tanner goes by his old apartment and finds, to his astonishment, that his key still fits. More amazing, all his old furniture is present and intact, a living museum to the “late” Evan Tanner. The biggest surprise still awaits him, however, as the little refugee girl he had adopted some 25 years ago still lives in the apartment . . . only she ain’t so little anymore.

It takes Tanner several months to catch up, to figure out how the events of the recent past have come together to shape the present. Voraciously reading back-issue newspapers and weekly news magazines, he draws upon his photographic memory to sort myriad random facts into some cohesive whole.

Though the strife has ended between the Soviet Union and America, there are still trouble spots left in the world where an intelligence man may ply his trade, and soon the reconstituted Tanner finds himself in Burma, on a mission to kill real-life Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi. It seems Tanner’s employer feels that the murder of Burma’s most famous daughter will foment insurrection in the Southeast Asian country, thereby creating any number of money-making opportunities for the adventurers savvy enough to capitalize on it.

Tanner quickly finds himself wrapped up in the proverbial web of intrigue, framed by the Burmese secret police, escaping to the frontier disguised as a Buddhist monk. (In the company of a beautiful bald woman who may be the heir to the Romanoff throne of Russia, yet.) More lighthearted than the Matt Scudder series, yet more topical and political than the Bernie Rhodenbarr books, Tanner on Ice is reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek novels of Donald Hamilton (the Matt Helm series) or even Ian Fleming’s classic James Bond stories. Anyone who enjoyed those will have a difficult time putting this one down.

Reviewed by Bruce Tierney.

A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you’re contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you’ll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We’re talking summer reading. Especially the easy-to-tote paperback variety. A hardcover sensation, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, literally spent years on bestseller lists. This month the 1994 title at last debuts in soft cover (Vintage, $12, 0679751521). Never mind that Clint Eastwood’s movie version has come and gone. If you haven’t read this account of life and death and murder Savannah-style, replete with its parade of beguiling eccentrics, you’re in for a mint-julep-flavored treat. Southern accents and sensibilities also abound in Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Flashing back and forth from the 1990s to the 1960s, the book explores Siddalee’s efforts to understand her seemingly incomprehensible mother, the Louisiana magnolia Viviane, and her three chums. Booted out of a Shirley Temple lookalike contest when they were just six, the girls spent their college years blazing a bourbon-splattered trail, buffered by the motto (from a Billie Holiday tune), smoke, drink, don’t think. As much a paean to sisterhood as it is a mother-daughter tale, Ya-Ya is a kind of follow-up to Wells’s much darker first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, (HarperCollins, $13, 0060976845), and is being developed for a movie by Bette Midler’s production company. Yet another girly story is recounted in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Penguin, $12.95, 014028009X). Helen Fielding’s book which originated as a column in a London newspaper is the first-person odyssey of the thirtysomething Bridget, who is obsessed with such ’90s issues as learning to program her VCR, finding Mr. Right, and, of course, weight loss (in one year she manages to lose 72 pounds . . . and to gain 74). The producers of the quirky Four Weddings and a Funeral plan a movie version of the quirky Bridget.

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, by first-time novelist Arthur S. Golden, may also be headed for the screen with Steven Spielberg’s involvement. For now, enjoy it in print (Vintage, $14, 0679781587), as the geisha Sayuri details her metamorphosis from peasant child she was nine when her widowed father sold her to a geisha house to her prewar rise as a leading geisha and on to her role as mistress to a power-broker. Golden spent nine years researching and writing this intricately detailed saga, which takes us on a memorable, eye-opening journey.

And last but not least, we mustn’t forget Margaret Mitchell’s monumental (and perennially best-selling) classic, Gone with the Wind (Warner Books, $7.99, 0446365386).

Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is also a biographer who has chronicled the lives of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.