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.

This combined history and memoir by her grandson arrives on the 40th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s death. Remarkable for her intellect, energy and compassion, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt has left a legacy, her chronicler argues, that is fully as durable in its own way as the one compiled by FDR as he led America through the Great Depression and all but the last few months of World War II. She was the first First Lady to achieve stature independently from that of her husband, and the first to demonstrate and tap into the latent political power of women.

Because his childhood memories of vacations and holidays with his grandmother are his most vivid ones, David Roosevelt writes of her with an unvarying mixture of warmth and wonder. Not so of FDR, who appears as a marginal figure in the author’s thoughts. It may take the reader awhile to adjust to Roosevelt’s repeated use of grandmere (a designation the French-speaking Eleanor requested of her grandchildren), but ultimately the preciousness wears off. Fortunately, Roosevelt leans on the research of scholars to fill in the factual blanks and interpretive nuances his own restricted perspective denies him.

Born into the same wealthy and socially prominent New York family that included her future husband (a distant cousin), Eleanor was handicapped early by a mother who rejected her and a father who was loving but dissolute. Her most positive early role models were her uncle, Teddy Roosevelt, and her teacher, the free-thinking Marie Souvestre. Both inspired her to think beyond the decorative, social and domestic roles then assigned to women. In what appeared to be a real affair of the heart, she married Franklin in 1905, when she was 20, and soon began having children. Five years later, Franklin scored his first political victory, election to the New York State Assembly. From the outset, the author says, Eleanor was his most reliable (if not always his most enthusiastic) political ally even though it would be several more years before women won the right to vote.

After Franklin fell victim to crippling polio in 1921, he grew even more reliant on Eleanor, and by the time he ascended to the presidency in 1933 she was perhaps the most vital part of his inner circle, serving as his eyes, ears and personal representative. As a young girl, she had worked to better the lot of New York’s poorest. In her capacity as First Lady, she became a tireless advocate for the nation’s downtrodden. She probed, lectured, wrote books and articles, even became a syndicated newspaper columnist. After FDR died in 1945, she continued her advocacy, ultimately helping to write and pass the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

David Roosevelt’s most revealing recollections of his grandmother are of her soul-mending retreats to Val-Kill Cottage, in New York, and Campobello Island, off the coast of Maine. The book is illustrated with 260 photographs, many of which have not been published before.

If Arizona Sen. John McCain is using his new memoir Worth the Fighting For to position himself for another run for the presidency, then he is either the dumbest or the foxiest campaigner in the race. Arguing for the former point is the fact that he readily sometimes gleefully admits to being ambitious, impatient, impulsive, politically mercurial and, under certain circumstances, deceptive. Of course, in publicly confessing to such shortcomings, he deftly denies his opponents the opportunity to dramatically spring these charges on him.

Unlike most political biographies, which tend to run to high seriousness, this one is sprinkled with gossip, candor and self-effacing humor. McCain makes it clear that his political stance is more instinctive than intellectual, and that it grows not only from his military upbringing and experience (of which he says relatively little) but also from his concept of what it means to be principled and heroic. McCain details here how he became acquainted with high-roller Charles Keating, forming a cozy relationship that would ultimately land him among the notorious Keating Five accused of influence-peddling after the flamboyant entrepreneur’s savings-and-loan empire went bust. It may have been this grueling and career-endangering incident as well as his own growing behind-the-scene awareness of how American politics work that caused McCain to join with fellow senator Russell Feingold in an effort to regulate campaign financing.

Some of McCain’s most revealing stories are about his short-lived campaign for president. He admits to attempting to deceive the voters of South Carolina by taking an equivocal stand on the state’s display of the Confederate flag, a position he later renounced.

In summarizing himself, McCain quotes a conservative critic who wrote, Politics is so personal for McCain. It’s all a matter of honor and integrity. That’s the sum total of his politics. To this assertion, McCain responds, If that’s the worst that can be said about my public career, I’ll take it, with appreciation.