The year Kathy Dobie turned 14, she had one thing on her mind: boys. Teenagers, grown men, it didn’t matter. She wanted them all, and she sent the message loud and clear with halter tops and swaying hips.

They took the bait and came running.

In her first book, a memoir called The Only Girl in the Car, Dobie describes the pivotal period in her life when the world of sex opened before her, and she plunged in with abandon. It was a heady time full of experiences far beyond the scope of her proper Catholic family, who didn’t suspect a thing.

Dobie’s upbringing was typical for the 1970s: a suburban Connecticut home, five brothers and sisters, a father who worked while her mother stayed home. Tired of being a dutiful daughter and big sister, Dobie rebelled against the wholesome image. She longed for danger and recklessness, spending her evenings at the smoky teen center, watching the guys play pool and imagining her body pressed up against them. Before long, she wasn’t just imagining.

“As far as I was concerned, I was doing exactly what the boys were doing, which meant I was as alive, as bold, as free, as they were,” she writes.

On an unforgettable March night, riding in a car full of those teen center boys, she got more than she bargained for. The experience resonated far beyond that bitterly cold evening, changing the course of her life forever.

With fresh, lively prose and a thoughtful delivery, Dobie manages to capture the eagerness and childlike trust that led her into danger, and the mental toughness and fortitude that helped her recover. What’s striking about the book is that Dobie, who has written for Harper’s, The Village Voice, Salon and other magazines, delves so honestly and fearlessly into a young girl’s sexual experiences and attitudes. She doesn’t shy away from the image she presents of herself as a reckless, eager teen with no regard for reputation or restraint.

Instead, by telling her story candidly, Dobie captures the complicated reality of a girl who’s impulsive and dreamy, honest and true to a fault. Her memoir ultimately is more than a coming-of-age story. Eloquent and sharp, The Only Girl in the Car is a lyrically rendered, candid book about teenage sexuality, and one girl with enough courage to strike out on her own and keep going. Rebecca Denton is a newspaper reporter who lives in Nashville.

<B>The pain of a boy’s final days</B> Native American author Nasdijj delivers an unforgettable memoir with <B>The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping</B>, a chronicle of the death of his adopted son, a 12-year-old Navajo born with AIDS. Nasdijj, whose first son, also adopted, died of fetal alcohol syndrome, is persuaded to adopt Awee by the boy’s parents, also AIDS patients. Against his better judgment, Nasdijj agrees. Taking on hopeless boys is something of an addiction with him, he admits.

"I want the mad ones," Nasdijj writes. "The children who have had everything taken away from them. The children who are broken and mad enough to attempt to repair themselves. The children mad enough to spit and fight." Nasdijj makes some unorthodox decisions about how Awee should spend his last weeks of life, choices he suspects minivan moms would not approve of. Instead of hunkering down in a hospital or hospice, with pill bottles and intravenous drip close at hand, Nasdijj takes his son on a motorcycle to the coast, lets him play baseball, lets him spend the day in an auto repair shop and introduces him to several Indian rites of passage. Along the way, Nasdijj exposes the failure of America’s health care system to provide relief for indigent AIDS patients, especially those on Indian reservations, where welfare hospitals may take as long as six weeks to return blood test results. Awee is frequently in and out of the hospital with pneumonia, with terrible pain from nerve damage, with sarcoma. The most scathing criticism Nasdijj offers is the health care industry’s failure to relieve a 12-year-old’s pain. Here, Nasdijj runs up against a medical brick wall. Pain medications for children with AIDS haven’t been developed, he writes, and doctors are unwilling to experiment. Despite the prevailing darkness and forgone conclusion of <B>The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping</B>, the book has wonderful moments of humor, whimsy and warmth. But the narrative’s most important accomplishment may very well be its biting commentary on the neglect of AIDS patients in a complacent society that mistakenly believes the monster has been leashed. <I>Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.</I>

Few journalists reach celebrity status. But if anyone is a superstar in his profession, it’s Hunter S. Thompson, who combined an adventuresome personal spirit with a hard-hitting, colorfully wrought style of writing, emerging from the ’60s as America’s legendary “gonzo” chronicler of politics and societal change. This somewhat scattershot memoir subtitled “Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century” features Thompson’s ruminations on a wide variety of public and private events, capturing along the way his committedly independent persona.

Thompson first offers some recollections from his early life growing up in Louisville, where he cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter, then launches into various episodes that either critically shaped his career or epitomize his seemingly fearless ability to venture into subcultural milieus and emerge not only with a story but also with a firmer sense of self.

Thompson’s experiences encompass work in the San Francisco sex industry, hanging with the Hell’s Angels, covering the tempestuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and consorting closely with politicians, movie stars, musicians and the Beat poets, among many others. Thompson loves football, guns (he was renowned for shooting up his typewriters), cars and motorcycles, pretty women, drugs and Colorado not necessarily in that order and he writes of his passions with the same intensity with which he infused his dozen previous books.

Now in his early 60s and still filing his characteristically opinionated stories with national and international publications, Thompson also includes some serious reflection on 9/11 and other current events, his constant references to our “Child President” making it pretty clear how little he regards the present chief executive. Still crazy after all these years, Thompson yet again manages to display his zeal for writing quirkily and well.

Montana native Blunt makes a strong debut with this memoir of life on a cattle ranch during the 1950s and ’60s. Raised in a rural area with no running water, the author was early initiated into the harsh realities of ranching, tackling chores and attending a one-room school. Unwillingly, she adhered to established gender roles, marrying a man from a neighboring homestead and trying to be a suitable wife. But after 12 years of marriage and the birth of three children, Blunt decided to follow her dream of becoming a writer. She said goodbye to the farm, enrolled in college and began composing award-winning verse. Her memoir reflects her penchant for the poetic. It’s beautifully written, full of unforgettable anecdotes about the severity of Montana living and the constraints of being a female in a man’s world. It’s also proof that you can’t keep a good woman down. A reading group guide is available in print and online at www.vintagebooks.com/read.

Sherwin Nuland recalls his “ambivalent heritage” Throughout his childhood in the 1930s and ’40s, Sherwin Nuland viewed his immigrant father through a prism of fear and embarrassment. Meyer Nudelman was never a violent man, according to his son, but he did have an unpredictable and volcanic temper that withered anyone in its path. Moreover, he suffered from a progressively crippling disease that made it difficult for him to walk about his Bronx neighborhood without his self-conscious son at his elbow. This tense proximity was so emotionally wrenching, Nuland says, that he had to write his new memoir, Lost In America: A Journey With My Father to finally come to terms with it.

Despite its ominous beginning, the book emerges as a heart-melting story of delayed compassion and love. Formerly a clinical professor of surgery at Yale and now a teacher of bioethics and medical history there, Nuland is also the author of The Mysteries Within, Leonardo da Vinci, and the National Book Award-winning How We Die. “I think my father left me with this ambivalent heritage,” the author explains, speaking to BookPage from his home in Connecticut. “As a child, as an adolescent, in my 20s, I always felt that the way to pattern my life the way of bringing up my own children, the way of being a husband was to be exactly the opposite of what he was. But clearly something was churning inside of me because of this very strong identification I had with his disabilities. . . . It wasn’t a question of consciously perceiving that he was with me all the time but that, in fact, he was inside of me without my knowing it.” Nuland’s reactive approach notwithstanding, his life began falling apart when he was in his late 30s and early 40s, long after his father had died. In addition to seeing his first marriage collapse, Nuland descended into such deep and unresponsive depression that he had to be hospitalized and subjected to a long series of electroshock treatments. “If you had seen me during this time,” he says, “you would say, My God, he has become his father!’ I spoke that way. In profile, I looked that way. I responded that way.” Even after he recovered (“I’m the least depressed human being on earth when I’m not actually depressed,” he says cheerfully), the filial complexities lingered.

Another strand of Nuland’s remembrances is of cultural assimilation. Until his death, Meyer Nudelman remained a transplanted Russian Jew not homogenized. He never lost his impenetrable accent, nor tried to, and he showed little interest in exploring his alien surroundings. Son Sherwin, however, was a quick study in fitting in, in assessing and mastering the landscape. “I think [assimilation] is the arc of a life,” Nuland says. “For some people, there’s a conscious need to accelerate it, because you really want to leave behind what you have been born into. To others, the motivation is more forward in the sense that you don’t necessarily want to leave what you have and what you are, but you’re really planning to become this other thing in this society which you find yourself. For me, it was both. But I think it was largely the first that I really had to get out of this atmosphere that I thought was stifling.” While still in high school, he legally jettisoned his father’s last name in favor of the more English-sounding Nuland. Eventually, he departed from his father’s religion as well. “It’s been one of the conflicts of my life,” he says. “It didn’t resolve until I fell apart. I came out of that experience realizing that I had truly always been an agnostic and that what had brought me in previous years to the synagogue was my inability to separate myself from my background, from my love of family and that whatever obsessional religious forms I carried out were just that they were obsessional. They were not real. They were not genuine, because I really had no belief.” Nuland concedes that his intelligence not only provided him a way out of his surroundings but was also a comfort while he was still in. “I was amazed by it. I could never figure it out. Of course, the Bronx was sort of a crucible for smart, hardworking kids in those days. I remember when I first started school, there were about five of us in class who seemed to be completely different from all the other kids. Eventually, we all skipped a grade. . . . My curiosity just seemed to be built in. But the realization that I had this ability to see things in certain ways that most other kids couldn’t was a real source of joy to me. It opened the world up. It made everything possible.” It eventually made possible Nuland’s acceptance into the Yale School of Medicine. The distance between New York and New Haven lessened the flash points between father and son. Meyer Nudelman spoke proudly to all who would listen about his son’s progress toward doctorhood. He doted on him, doing him small favors like preparing massive batches of chocolate pudding every time he returned home. For his part, Nuland visited his father dutifully during his increasingly long stays in the hospital, and rushed to his bedside to tell him in person when Yale awarded him the hotly competed for post of chief resident. As his father slowly absorbed the good news, Nuland writes, he saw in the old man’s face “something beyond pride. It was vindication; if was fulfillment; it was the love of a father for his son. . . . I threw my arms around Pop’s shoulders and made no attempt to disguise the tears.” After tackling deeply personal topics in Lost In America, Nuland turns in his next book, nearly completed, to a more detached subject the life of the 19th-century obstetrician Ignatz Semmelweis. Edward Morris is a freelance writer in Nashville.

College professors sometimes wish for the impossible: an opportunity to re-convene class to correct or amend lectures they delivered years ago. A full-time university teacher for 35 years before retiring from academia seven years ago, top-selling historian Stephen Ambrose came as close as one can to achieving that feat before his death in October. “I want to correct all the mistakes I made” in the classroom, he said, in explaining his decision to write To America: Personal Reflections of a Historian.

For instance, acknowledging “I did not know then what I do now,” Ambrose says in his final work that, contrary to what generations of students have been taught, it was disease not a deliberate policy of genocide that wiped out many Indian tribes as the government pushed the frontier westward. At first, he denounced the bombing of Hiroshima but, upon learning more, began telling his students: “Thank God for Harry Truman for his courage and decisiveness.” He details why he came to praise rather than condemn the “robber barons” who mined millions of dollars in financing the first transcontinental railroad. And he explains how he evolved from an admitted Nixon hater to someone with a genuine appreciation of the disgraced president.

To America is a mixture of interpretive history, personal recollection and parental musings from one of our country’s most popular historians with subjects ranging from Thomas Jefferson (“an intellectual coward” for doing nothing about slavery) to Lyndon Johnson, from racialism to women’s rights, from war heroes to explorers. Ambrose also shares the work habit that resulted in his writing or editing some 30 books, a number of which sped from the bindery to best-seller lists: “You do it by working hard, six to 10 hours per day, six or seven days a week.” He was also helped by the services of an “in-house” editor; his wife Moira listened to his readings of whatever he wrote each day and offered her suggestions. Thus, his advice to aspiring authors: “Marry an English major.” Ambrose wrote To America after learning in April that he had lung cancer. Unsure how long he would live, he set aside other work to write this final book, which he described as his “best” which means better than such blockbusters as Undaunted Courage, Citizen Soldiers and D-Day June 6, 1944. Whether or not To America is his best work, its pages certainly pulsate with the spirit and optimism of an author who was deeply in love with America.

Chicago-based entertainment writer Bill Zehme (pronounced ZAY-mee) has been cranking out interesting and colorful celebrity profiles for 20 years, mostly for such magazines as Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Few journalists have managed to produce such a steady body of quality work interviews at once entertaining and informative, focusing on media icons and written in an incisive, yet edgy, style.

Intimate Strangers, an engrossing collection of Zehme’s notable stories from the past two decades, showcases the author’s sometimes quirky but always fascinating approaches to the minds of such legendary figures as Hugh Hefner, Tom Hanks, Cameron Diaz, the Seinfeld gang, Johnny Depp and Eddie Murphy.

Zehme doesn’t merely ask a series of prepared questions; he’ll often spend days with his interviewees, keeping his tape recorder on, sharing their lives and gaining the necessary trust to elicit offbeat, ultimately revealing responses. The fact that these pieces date back to the early 80s ensures a curiously welcome historical perspective on popular culture. We hear Woody Allen’s pained remarks during the aftermath of the still-simmering Soon-Yi scandal; glimpse notorious ladies’ man Warren Beatty in the days before he settles down into wedded bliss; and listen to Madonna during her peak as a pop tart talking about Catholicism and the importance of her father in her life.

The book concludes with an insightful series of alternating, point-counterpoint interviews that Zehme published through the 90s with David Letterman and Jay Leno, during the era of Johnny Carson’s impending retirement. With Zehme just recently launching a new cable interview show on the Bravo channel, the timing is perfect for the release of this hip collection, which exhibits his skills as pop journalist to maximum effect. Filmmaker Cameron Crowe provides the introduction.