George Plimpton’s The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair: And Other Excursions and Observations is not unlike its late author: erudite in manner, endearing in tone, an elegant anomaly in a world so often characterized by its lack of grace and charm. Edited by his widow, Sarah Dudley Plimpton, and published a year after his death, the book brings together the many articles and essays Plimpton wrote during his reign as the father of participatory journalism. As he writes in one of the later pieces, My Olympic Trials, Everyone must wonder wistfully if there isn’t something other than what they actually practice in their lives (playing in a yacht-club tennis tournament) at which they would be incredibly adept if they could only find out what it was. . . . If an idiot savant could sit down at a piano and suddenly bat out a Chopin Žtude, wasn’t the same sort of potential locked up somewhere in all of us? What’s intriguing about Plimpton is that he actually did seek out this unknown other, this something else. In true Walter Mitty fashion, he played Amateur Night at the Apollo, photographed Playboy playmates and stood on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium. In doing so, he led us all to believe that we the Everymen, the Underdogs of the world could live out our whims and our quiet fantasies, too.

Perhaps it is this sense of endless possibility that ensured Plimpton would never grow old. During my first year out of college I had the good fortune of earning an internship at Plimpton’s literary journal, The Paris Review. Parties were common occurrences and as I was young and living in New York City for the first time, I should have been the one to stay up well into the night dancing and socializing. Instead, it was more often the tall, gangly 70-year-old by the bar who had the energy, who, like some literary Pied Piper, led us all on to the next restaurant, the next club or late night game of pool. What I remember most about Plimpton, though, is the graciousness with which he treated everyone he met. Though possessed of a family lineage that included senators, tycoons and the first American poet, and though educated at such esteemed institutions as Harvard and Cambridge, Plimpton never resorted to arrogance or condescension. It is one reason why people were drawn to him, why he had more people claiming him as a best friend than he probably ever realized.

As a writer, Plimpton’s strength lay in his subtlety. To be funny, you don’t always have to be obvious and when you’re writing about an adult film convention ( In the Playpen of the Damned ) or a wildlife documentary filmmaker and his succession of near-death experiences ( The Man Who Was Eaten Alive ), you don’t need a heavy hand. He may have been a participatory journalist, but he knew how to pull back and let a story tell itself. In his world, celebrities and eccentrics were part of a larger tableau, an ongoing narrative that never lost its wonder. When, after one long night with Hunter S. Thompson, Plimpton thinks back to the circus-like atmosphere, he remembers a story Thompson told him and writes, And as I weaved home on my bicycle not long before dawn, I thought, Oh, Hunter, write that one, and a lot more. It was in the cramped and tiny Paris Review offices that Plimpton used to store his bicycle. Hung high from the ceiling, it hovered over the heads of the staff, looking perfectly at home next to such accoutrements as a lion tamer’s chair, a stuffed bird, a framed letter from the prime minister of France. He rode it often and when out walking in the neighborhood it was entirely possible that one might catch sight of him his clothes a bit rumpled, his white hair flying about his face as he ever so slightly teetered off down the street. It was an anxiety-inducing visual as he often appeared on the verge of falling into the busy New York traffic. In true Plimpton fashion though, he had it all under control, and much like The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, every part was perfectly balanced and of course, full of endless charm.

Lacey Galbraith is a writer in Nashville.

Sports writers traffic in idolatry, or at least they did when Roger Kahn broke into the business some 60 years ago. The great ones, though, see beyond mere statistics and discern the shape of character within these tumbled numbers. Kahn writes here of people who enriched his life through the examples they set as competitors, most notably Jackie Robinson, the first black ballplayer in the major leagues, and his double-play partner, Pee Wee Reese, the first white ballplayer to dare to become Robinson’s friend and defender.

But to write about these heroes, Kahn first had to learn what it meant to write well and with conviction. In learning these lessons he met other heroes, men like Stanley Woodward, his editor and mentor at the New York Tribune, who defied de facto censorship to expose the hatred directed toward Robinson by his peers. Also on the list are Robert Frost, Eugene McCarthy and others.

How can we find meaning from this, we who aren’t privileged to associate with demigods? The answer lies in the last chapter, which Kahn dedicates to his son, Roger Lawrence Kahn, whose turbulent life ended in suicide 19 years ago. Young Roger never left his mark beyond immediate family a family that, in Kahn’s graceful, pared-down prose, feels uncomfortably familiar. Yet everyone that preceded him, and all who have followed, seem to circle him and, in his absence, become important not because of their notoriety but in spite of it.

<b>Knocking on heaven’s door</b> Roger Housden wants you to consider sin in a whole new light as a means toward enlightenment! In <b>Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living</b> Housden presents erudite, witty essays on seven so-called transgressions sensuality, foolishness, ignorance, imperfection, uselessness, ordinariness and prodigality. Touting a pleasure principle over a punitive path to happiness, Housden argues that joy can lead to the upwelling of the human spirit, which always lives and breathes beyond the confines of right and wrong. There are no case studies, success stories or how-to exercises in <b>Seven Sins</b>. Instead, we get the author’s personal reflections on modern life, sprinkled throughout with apt, wide-ranging references and quotes from philosophers and poets, scientists, political figures, artists and literary greats. This book is a subjective prescription for happiness, an utter delight, filled with Housden’s trademark self-deprecatory humor and slightly offbeat insight. You probably won’t see hell if you read this book, but you just might catch a glimpse of heaven.

Americans love to hear good fish stories. We expect the angler to exaggerate his skills, along with the almost insurmountable weather conditions and, most importantly, the size of the elusive finned beast. Romantic notions of the great outdoors and philosophical ruminations must also be included in the tale, because as any weekend warrior will admit fishing is a sport of chance, and the odds do not favor the human species.

Ian Frazier expertly follows the above narrative recipe in The Fish’s Eye, and the result is a delicious concoction of humorous, often self-deprecating essays that cover more than 20 years of chasing the Big One. Frazier, author of On the Rez, hauls his pole and tackle box to a few unlikely fishing holes for some unusual observations. There is New York City’s Harlem Meer, for instance, where even the most amateur handler of bait can catch key rings, plastic globes and the arm of a doll. While fishing in the urban riparian areas of the East Coast for striped bass a fish that can top the scales at 60 pounds or more Frazier makes perhaps the only striper-New Yorker comparison in modern literature. Coming from his expert pen, this could be the start of an entirely new canon. “Striped bass are in many respects the perfect New York fish,” he writes. “They go well with the look of downtown. They are, for starters, pinstriped; the lines along their sides are black fading to light cobalt blue at the edges. The dime-size silver scales look newly minted, and there is an urban glint to the eye and a mobility to the wide predator jaw. If they could talk, they would talk fast.” Many bait and bullet publications proffer advice on how to survive a blizzard with only a postage stamp and a fountain pen. “I wish I had down-to-earth wisdom like that to impart,” Frazier says, “but when I search my knowledge, all that comes to mind is advice that would cause me to run and hide after I gave it.” He is too modest. Through these easy-flowing essays, Frazier shows us that all the wisdom we will ever need to know is within a short walk of the nearest river. Stephen J. Lyons writes from Monticello, Illinois.

Many medical school graduates want to establish lucrative private practices, but for Kevin M. Cahill, M.D., the Bronx-born son of an Irish physician, that was never enough. Instead, Cahill became a leading specialist in tropical medicine, treating victims of famine, violence, war and disease for 45 years in some of the most volatile areas of the globe. He has also become a potent force in humanitarian assistance and international relief efforts as lecturer, teacher, activist, diplomat and advocate, becoming involved in a “major move to alter the ways that America delivers health services abroad.” To Bear Witness: A Journey of Healing and Solidarity is an illustrated collection of Cahill’s writings from op-ed pieces and essays to speeches and articles documenting the metamorphosis that occurred in his life as he became “immersed in the tragedies of third world countries.” Tales of Cahill’s humanitarian and medical missions to Lebanon, Somalia, Nicaragua, Libya and Ireland, among other countries, lead to his desire to change the way governments form foreign policies, offering insights often left off the table in political debates, legal arguments and military planning. Cahill speaks movingly about the landmine crisis, “one of the great scourges of history . . . turning vast areas of the earth into wastelands of death, economic ruin and social disintegration.” And as the chief medical advisor for Counterterrorism to the New York City Police Department, he offers another perspective on the losses of 9/11; with millions dead of disease and starvation in Somalia and Sudan, nearly a million hacked to death in Rwanda, along with massive human causalities in Armenia, Srebrenica, Congo and Central America over recent decades, “it is important to keep a balance if we are to live in an international world that also knows the constant fear of death and the reality of tragedy.” A professional from a privileged nation, Cahill’s chosen work has drawn him into a personal relationship with suffering and the inequities experienced by the “downtrodden masses” who survive incredible challenges and have become his “role models in how to live with courage and joy in a harsh but still hopeful world.” Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville.

What is life without all its trappings? That’s the question Gretel Ehrlich seems to be pursuing in her fascinating new book This Cold Heaven, a collection of reminiscences about Greenland. Starting in 1993, Ehrlich made several trips to the continent a place where life is stripped down to its essentials and experienced each of its seasons: four months of constant darkness and four months of perpetual daylight with periods of twilight in between. She encountered native culture firsthand, traveling across vast, ice-locked stretches of land by dogsled. Like the natives, she learned to love dogs, the rough pleasures of sled travel, even the sunless arctic winters. Though Danish explorers partly colonized Greenland and intermarried with the indigenous Inuit, the hazardous and lean arctic way of life has largely protected the island from change. It is much as it was centuries ago. Success is still measured by having enough to eat during the winter and by keeping one’s children alive. Ehrlich punctuates her own journal with amusing vignettes from the life story of Inuit-Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen.

A man of undaunted energy, Rasmussen sledded, danced and hunted with the Inuit during the early years of the 20th century, collecting and recording the stories of the natives. You might think the arctic a lonely place, but it was hardly so for Rasmussen, a sort of Danish Will Rogers who never met an Eskimo he didn’t like. Like Rasmussen, Ehrlich threw herself on the mercy of Greenlanders during her travels, sleeping on their floors and communicating with sign language when she could find no one to interpret. She met and profiled a surprising number of people who came from more "civilized" parts of the world, but who had been seduced by the long arctic winter nights and unbroken summer days, by a simpler, rawer life. Ehrlich is intrigued with Inuit folklore, and her retelling of these tales is perhaps the most moving element in the book. In beautifully poetic prose, she offers wonderful insight into unfamiliar territory an obscure country composed mainly of ice, where whales and walruses are still hunted with harpoons. Author of the national bestseller A Match to the Heart, Ehrlich has written a memorable book that should solidify her reputation as one of our most accomplished nature writers.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

75 years after his death, Harry Houdini remains unsurpassed in the history of magic as an escape artist. In Houdini’s Box, Adam Phillips maintains there is a trace of the man in each of us, because we all spend part of our time trying literally or figuratively to escape from something. To support his contention, Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, uses two concurrent narratives. In one, he explores Houdini’s need to escape and in the other, he allows the reader to eavesdrop on his sessions with a patient who, in a sense, represents the rest of us.

Instead of revealing how Houdini accomplished his feats, Phillips examines why he developed his death-defying effects. In performing an intellectual autopsy on Houdini, Phillips offers ingenious interpretations of the magician’s mindset: a compulsion not only to extricate himself from any contraption he or anyone else could devise, but to be the only person able to do it. In the second narrative, the reader, as if seated on a chair next to the psychoanalyst’s couch, can follow the dialogue in a series of sessions between Phillips and his troubled, middle-aged patient, who says he wants to escape from his feelings about women. The exchanges between the two underscore Phillips’ thesis that “we cannot describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from, and what we believe we need to escape to.” In Phillips’ view, our lives are largely shaped by what he calls exits, elsewheres and avoidances. He sees Adam and Eve as players in “a great escape story, the story of a failed breakout.” Phillips, whose previous books have ranged from such topics as guilt and childhood to tickling and kissing, devotes one chapter of Houdini’s Box to a provocative study of the use of the word “escape” by Emily Dickinson, who spent the last 24 years or so of her life in the seclusion of her garden and her room, where she composed more than 1,700 poems. The essay is an appropriate conclusion to this illuminating and intriguing book.

A Florida writer, Alan Prince escapes by practicing and performing sleight of hand.

Because I Said So, edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri, is a searing collection of essays from 33 women facing the challenges of motherhood in the 21st century, when automatic, autocratic parental axioms are of little help. Despite the common thread of motherhood, there’s a wide span of subject matter here children, sex, men, aging, faith, race from an eclectic array of cultural perspectives and attitudes, and from a terrific lineup of first-rate writers. “On Giving Hope” is just one of the many gems in this collection. Written by Mariane Pearl (her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl was killed by terrorists in 2001 while she was pregnant with their first child), this narrative testifies to the power of love to override hate and bring hope. “I know that by killing my husband, the terrorists expect to break my life, too, and that of my son,” Pearl writes. “But I am fighting the holiest of fights, and I win. Giving birth to our baby is my ultimate act of anti-terrorism.” Linda Stankard is a mother and a daughter.

It’s tempting to compare rural writer Verlyn Klinkenborg to pillars of American literature such as Robert Frost and Henry Thoreau. Like Frost, Klinkenborg can find the universe in a dead bug on a page of writing paper. Like Thoreau, his meditations get at the natural relationship between man and the woods. But Klinkenborg, The New York Times editorial-page writer, uses language with such mastery and has such a unique style that these comparisons may not do him full justice.

The Rural Life is presented (somewhat deceptively) in the form of a journal, begun in January in a flurry of good intentions for the New Year. Each of the 12 chapters contains a series of meditations on the tasks and the weather of one calendar month. The individual meditations are self-sufficient, each a little gem with passages so witty and insightful, readers will find themselves looking around for somebody they could read them to.

The loose weave of the book allows Klinkenborg to write about a wide array of rural phenomena, from raising bees to watching the first snow fall to lighting the wood stove to mending fences. There’s no narrative device holding the pieces together no plot, in other words. On the contrary, the action doesn’t even take place in a single setting, but leaps from Wyoming to New York to Utah. As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that this is not simply the journal of one year in Klinkenborg’s life but a collage of remembered experiences, recalled against the vivid backdrop of the changing seasons.

So the focus here is not upon any particular sequence of events in the author’s life, but on how people experience the seasons and the movement of time, a subject Klinkenborg keeps drifting back to like an Iowa snowfall.

One of the strongest chapters in the book is “June,” in which Klinkenborg remembers his father’s habits of industry, his love of carpentry and the family ranch he built on the outskirts of Sacramento, California. The writer honestly reports on his adolescent rebellion against this quiet, hard-working father. Then, in the middle of life, Klinkenborg finds himself putting on the garden gloves and going outside to do some project, just as his father used to do. Here Klinkenborg has caught an experience common to people in middle age finding their parents in themselves, after all.

Because its charms are so subtle and its structure so non-linear, it’s almost impossible to adequately capture The Rural Life in a review. But I do find myself wanting to e-mail some of Klinkenborg’s best passages to my friends or paste them on highway billboards. This one, for instance: “We live in a world of margins, every hour an occasion of its own, where sometimes the weather and the landscape and the state of the foliage live up to the idea of the very season we say is at hand.” Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

On September 9, 2001, two suicidal Arabs posing as journalists murdered Ahmed Shah Massoud, the brilliant strategist of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Two days later, Al Qaeda operatives flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center. In The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan, a collection of pieces written for The New Yorker magazine, reporter Jon Lee Anderson develops a strong case that the two events were related with Massoud’s death quashing the best chance of tracking and capturing Osama bin Laden.

Afghan intelligence officials surmise that the link between Massoud’s slaying and the attack on the World Trade Center was this: Al Qaeda anticipated that Massoud’s death would destroy the Northern Alliance. Thus, if America struck back, it would have no Afghan allies on the ground. Anderson writes that Massoud, as a veteran of two decades of fighting in Afghanistan, knew most of the places where bin Laden might hide. In the early stages of U.S. retaliation, televised news featured on-the-spot reports by national and local anchors. These visiting stars typically attended military briefings, peered through the windows and returned home a few days later as “experts.” Then there were the seasoned war reporters who sneaked into places where few sane people dared to go. That’s what Anderson did in order to capture better than television could the nuances of a land ruled by gun-hugging tribal chiefs, ruthless warlords and gangs of renegade Taliban fighters.

Anderson shares his exclusive moments with people high and low officials, warlords, prisoners, bandits, peasants and details the perplexing politics, deep-rooted blood feuds and shifting allegiances that characterize Afghanistan. A special treat is the collection of private messages Anderson sent to The New Yorker. The messages reflect the perils of war reporting and the savvy required to get a story to the editors. This compelling book supports the widely held notion that no job in journalism is harder than the foreign correspondent’s. To understand September 11, we have to understand Afghanistan and that’s what Anderson bravely helps us do. Alan Prince, a former news editor, lectures at the University of Miami.