Nevada Barr is sporting a new hat. For her latest book, she has put her deeply creased “writer of mystery thrillers” chapeau on its peg and donned one fit for a venture into the genre of spiritual memoir. Seeking Enlightenment . . . Hat by Hat: A Skeptic’s Look at Religion is a record of Barr’s journey from being a borderline atheist in her youth to a deeply spiritual though not categorically Christian adult. Barr still brings her “sleuthing,” analytical mind to her search for inner peace and spiritual understanding, though the hat she wears for this work is broader-brimmed and not without a bit of bounce and whimsy.

Her upbringing in Nevada (yes, she’s named for her birth state) did not prepare her for the unapologetic talk of “God” and “Jesus” she encountered when she moved to Mississippi, but she was ready to listen. “I doubt a trip to Dixie would bring God into everybody’s life,” she explains, “but when I arrived, I had pretty much exhausted all other avenues. My marriage had gone down in flames. I was clinically depressed, haunted by nightmares, broke and, at the age of 41, embarking on my third career, this time as a law enforcement ranger for the National Park Service.” Her protagonist, Anna Pigeon (featured in such bestsellers as Flashback, Hunting Season and Blood Lure), happens to be a crime-solving park ranger, so Barr’s move to the South was fortuitous in more ways than one.

Despair and loneliness drove her out of her apartment one evening for a walk. The dimly-lit stained glass windows of a nearby church attracted her. She decided to try the door, figuring if it wasn’t locked, she could sit inside and brood alone. The door was open, but there were four women inside; they herded her in, talked with her, made her feel welcome. It happened to be an Episcopal Church Barr stumbled into that night, and she became a member and has “hung her hat” there ever since. From then on, she explains, “I have been on a wonderful journey, sometimes Christian, sometimes not, but always in communion with other people.” While writing from her own experience eliminated the extensive plotting and research required for a novel, Barr explained in a recent interview that this work had its own difficulties. “In some ways, this was easier. For one thing, each chapter is between two and six pages long, so I got to feel a sense of accomplishment finishing each section along the way. I didn’t have to wait for the full closure of a novel.” Still, Seeking Enlightenment was a major undertaking. “I spent about a year on it, but it covers the thoughts of a lifetime,” Barr says. “The hardest part, though,” and here she breaks into laughter, “was when it was actually accepted. I didn’t even tell my editor I was working on it I just did it and then, when I sent it in and they bought it, there was this feeling: Oh no! Have I just volunteered to run naked through Times Square? Because it’s so personal!” But Barr recognized early on in the writing that in order to bare her soul and write honestly about topics like “Sin,” “Prayer,” “Humility,” and “An Argument for Life After Death” (all among the mini-chapters in her book) she had no choice but to use the “I” word. “If it wasn’t personal, it would be preaching,” she points out. “And I didn’t want to do that. And if it weren’t personal, who would identify with it? Women are very personal animals.” Despite her spiritual awakening, there is no “holier-than-thou” tone to Seeking Enlightenment, and it will undoubtedly strike a chord with many women, who, like Barr, are of the “baby boomer” generation. “What we know intellectually and how we behave seems oddly dichotomous,” Barr admits. “I believe with every cell of my being that cigarettes cause cancer,” she says laughing candidly, “and yet I smoke four cigarettes a day come rain or shine.” Seeking Enlightenment . . . Hat by Hat may be the saga of one woman’s spiritual journey, but there is much to identify with and plenty to learn from Barr’s experience. Hats off to you, Nevada Barr!

Robb White shortchanges himself with the title of his new memoir, How to Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt. The book is so much more than its name entails. First of all, White made the tin canoe in question when he was a kid, but for four decades since then he has been building wooden boats. Second, the book is as much about life as it is about boats, and it will amuse and inform campers, anglers, sailors and just about anybody else who’s willing to disengage themselves from the web or the television and taste the open air.

White recalls that he was about 8 years old when he captained his first boat; among his “crew” were 4-year-olds who he says knew more about the fish in the Gulf of Mexico and the Georgia wetlands than most graduate students in a nearby university marine lab. White’s “rule of joy” permeates this warm and sometimes irreverent memoir of an outdoor life that flowered from those early years: “The important thing ain’t comfort, it’s joy. Joy in boats is inverse to their size. When they get big and full of engines, batteries, toilets, stoves, and other comforts, there just ain’t as much room for joy.” This is also a story of self-reliance: “I do not trust machinery of any kind,” the author writes. “I never go out in a boat that cannot be propelled some other way. I’ll be damned if I’ll undignify myself by sitting helplessly out there in the hot sun dialing 911 on a cellular phone. I would rather row 30 miles, and indeed I have.” White’s father was a prolific author and television and movie scriptwriter. His sister, Bailey White, an occasional NPR commentator, is the best-selling author of Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel. It’s now clear that Robb White, who knows and shares “a thing or two about a thing or two,” has also been blessed with the gene of gifted storytelling. Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami.

You can’t accuse Robert MacNeil of being impulsive. The novelist, playwright and former host of The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour worked in the United States on and off for 45 years before he decided to cast his lot with the Yanks and become an American citizen. Looking For My Country explains how he reached this decision and traces his career as a frontline newsman.

MacNeil, who was born in Montreal and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had two American grandparents. But his mother was an Anglophile who saw little to admire in that country to the south. MacNeil made his first foray into America in 1952, seeking work as an actor. Then, after laboring as a print and television journalist in England for a few years, he returned to America in 1963 as a reporter for NBC. The new job plunged him into the middle of some of the great stories of the century, among them the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of President Kennedy. In 1975, MacNeil launched the program that would become The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. There he remained until 1995. Two years later, he became an American citizen partly for convenience and partly from a growing appreciation of what the country meant to him. “Just when you think that there isn’t any new news and you’ve seen everything come and go,” he tells BookPage from his office in New York, “then something like the present war [with Iraq] happens or something like 9/11 happens, which certainly shook my thinking and had a profound effect on me. 9/11 made me understand my attachment to this country in an emotional way that I don’t think I understood before. It had been creeping up on me. Then, suddenly, I felt defensive about it, and a lot of my equivocation just vanished.” It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that the 72-year-old author has become a flack for Old Glory. He still speaks of America with the same measured tone and reportorial detachment that endeared him to a generation of news junkies. Besides the new book, he’s written a play about Karla Faye Tucker, the murderer turned devout Christian who was executed in Texas in 1998. The play has already had a workshop production in Connecticut and is now in search of a New York venue. MacNeil is also overseeing a special for PBS called Do You Speak American?, a sequel to the acclaimed The Story Of English series, which he helped produce for PBS in the 1980s.

Being a foreign-born reporter on an American beat was never particularly difficult, MacNeil recalls. “You learn, just as you learn good manners, how to approach things with a certain amount of diplomacy. Also, when I didn’t like something, I could keep my opinion to myself. After I became a citizen, I felt freer to say what I thought about this country, both negative and positive. I think I had been, consciously and subconsciously, biting my tongue in the past.” MacNeil does precious little tongue-biting in his book. He points out America’s lack of comprehensive health care, its harsh penal system and its refusal to control guns. “The luxury of not being in the [news] business anymore,” he says, “is that I can say things like that, and I don’t have to pretend.” But MacNeil is quick to acknowledge that America has become a far more open society than the one he first visited. “Oh, I think hugely less puritanical,” he says. “There’s the relaxation of the sexual mores, for example, and greater tolerance for all kinds of behavior that would have shocked people 50 years ago. The last half-century has been an amazing period of informalizing in America. [Consider] the sodomy case that is being heard in the Supreme Court now. The expectation is that the Court will overturn those laws because society has become increasingly tolerant of homosexual behavior. That’s a huge change. And I’m in favor of that because I have a gay son, who’s a very successful theater designer.” Citizenship, MacNeil reflects, enables him to engage in politics at a level he finds comfortable: “I never wanted to be a pundit. I never wanted to write op-ed pages or go on television and sound off about things or be a politician. I’m happy to have my own opinion and air it when I think it’s necessary.” Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

You’d think that life-long friendships would bond a group of coal miners rescued after more than a week of being buried alive, but it didn’t work out that way for the 18 Nova Scotians whose story Melissa Fay Greene recounts in her new book Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster. Surviving nature’s violence and overcoming bruised egos were only two of the challenges the men faced as a result of the disaster, which Greene recounts through exhaustive and meticulous research. Remarkably, she is able to reconstruct their 1958 ordeal of being entombed in the world’s deepest coal mine, located in Springhill, Nova Scotia, as well as the aftermath of the tragedy, and she caps the story with a wonderfully moving account of the town’s remembrances more than four decades later.

After the underground geological convulsion that claimed 75 lives, Greene finds “deep in the pit, the survivors loved their mothers and wives more tenderly than ever and promised God they’d show the women how much they loved them, if only they could be released from this hole and permitted to walk, once more, up a little blacktop street toward home.” Then, using their own words, she records the trapped miners’ swings from determination and anger to disgust and fear, and, in some cases, hallucination. However, disaster does not always equal hopelessness, and we also meet the heroes, the miners who buoyed the spirits of their colleagues while the odor of rotting corpses wafted around them. After the rescue, the media, as is their wont, singled out one miner for more attention than the others, sowing resentment and dividing forever the men who once were united in tragedy. We see how they coped or didn’t cope with post-trauma stress and how the passing of years has twisted their memories and their families’ recollections of the most important event of their lives. This is a superb study of the human condition in extremis. Now we can almost laugh at the conniptions of hapless Georgia officials who seeking to promote segregated Jekyll Island as a resort area invited the miners to vacation there, only to discover that the last man rescued was black.

Greene’s previous books, Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing, were National Book Award finalists. Last Man Out will challenge those readers who tend to prolong the pleasure of a compelling book by rationing the last chapters; they set the book aside after savoring one page and return to it later. This book is sure to break them of that habit. Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an ex-newsman and college lecturer.

The impetus to travel usually springs from a pleasurable sense of physical restlessness. But it was a feeling of spiritual unease that provided the catalyst for journalist Fenton Johnson’s recent odyssey. His fascinating personal chronicle Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey is a provocative account of travels both literal and metaphorical undertaken in an effort to redefine his spiritual faith. When Johnson, a disenfranchised Roman Catholic, is invited to an international gathering of Christian and Buddhist monks at the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he attends, planning to use the experience as material for an article. But he’s surprised during the opening prayers by a sudden paralyzing anger that prevents him from making the reverential sign of the cross: “I have known this script since before memory . . . a simple gesture I once inhabited as easily as lifting my hand to wave goodbye . . . and I could not do it,” he marvels. So begins Johnson’s “cross-country journey through the briars and thistles of faith,” during which he ruthlessly dissects the disillusionment and skepticism that had grown from his Roman Catholic roots. He voluntarily enters periods of residential life at both western Buddhist and Christian monasteries, notably California’s Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery and Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey. These residential immersions, which afford unique opportunities to interview monastic community members and teachers, complement the author’s rigorous ecumenical research. The result is a unique spiritual and philosophical investigation: a tightly woven helix of self-examination, historical discussion and inquiry into the sublime and perilous landscapes of religious belief and faith. Rich in honest self-revelation and the glories of an open-hearted search for sacred connection, Keeping Faith offers valid inspiration for spiritual seeking. Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.

<B>Sandra Day O’Connor lightens up a little</B>

John Riggins, the pro football player, once embarrassed himself and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with a comment he made while in his cups sitting next to her at a Washington fund-raiser. "Lighten up, Sandy Baby," he was alleged to have said. The frosty reply of the first woman in history to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court is not recorded. <B>The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice</B>, Sandra Day O’Connor’s new book, reflects her serious side, but it’s written in a light, informative and elegantly simple style. Not only informative to laymen and lawyers alike it’s elevating, and the author’s dedication and love of the law shines through on every page. O’Connor has divided the book into six parts, with sections focusing on history, women in law, and law in the 21st century, among other topics. Particularly interesting is her selection of seven past members of the court who she feels made notable contributions to the court and the judicial system. Although Oliver Wendell Holmes is on the list, there are others who might surprise the reader. One in this category is Chief Justice Warren Burger, who has never enjoyed particularly good standing among the academics who write about the court. Justice Lewis Powell is profiled for his personal traits. "For those who seek a model of human kindness, decency, exemplary behavior, and integrity, there will never be a better man," O’Connor writes. Thurgood Marshall is the raconteur, Holmes the giant in the area of individual rights, William Howard Taft (the only former president to sit on the court) the great and politic chief justice often overshadowed by John Marshall, and Charles Evans Hughes the chief justice who helped defeat the Roosevelt court-packing plan. <B>The Majesty of the Law</B> contains a number of interesting details. We learn, for instance, that the bas-relief of Chief Justice Marshall in a dining room of the Supreme Court was actually sculpted by Justice Burger. We also find out that the justices shake hands before sitting to hear cases each day.

In one sense, reading this book is a bittersweet experience. O’Connor articulately and eloquently describes the workings of the system of justice we enjoy. She explores judicial principles and administrative aspects of the Supreme Court, and gives her views on leading judicial figures. She discusses the lack of civility in the current legal profession. What she does not do and what no sitting Supreme Court justice in our times has ever done is "talk out of school" and tell us some of the things we’re dying to know. What was it like behind the scenes when the Bush v. Gore decision was made? Does she have any regrets regarding that decision? Is the current ideological split on the court uncomfortable? Does she want to be chief justice and, if not, who does she think would be best for the job? We may never get her answers to those questions, at least as long as she sits on the court. This is O’Connor’s second venture into writing a book. Her memoir <I>Lazy B</I>, an account of her childhood on a large Arizona ranch, revealed a compact but engaging writing style that she employs to advantage in this book as well. Simple, straightforward and never turgid, <B>The Majesty of the Law</B> makes interesting reading for anyone with a desire to know our court system better. <I>R. Dobie Langenkamp is an attorney and professor of law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.</I>

Memoirs of a remote childhood tend to be either idyllic or pockmarked with trauma. In his new autobiography, The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War, Samuel Hynes’ often lyrical recollections lie somewhere between. The period Hynes chronicles is from 1924, when he was born in Chicago, until his induction into the Navy in 1943. His mother died when he was five, but his stepmother was kind, cheerful and attentive. His father was financially ruined in the Depression, yet the family, while living frugally, never lacked the necessities. Most of the action takes place in Minneapolis, although the author presents a charming chapter on the summer he and his brother spent on a farm while their father was getting family affairs in order.

Now retired from Princeton University, where he was a professor of literature, Hynes author of a previous memoir, the much-praised Flights of Passage invests his book with academic exactitude. He recalls or has researched for the reader’s benefit the precise names of classmates, neighborhood streets and stores, household products, the arrangement and furnishings of rooms and even the broadcast times of his favorite radio shows. He remembers recipes and “wise sayings” and the character of particularly brutal snowstorms.

Buttressing this factual precision are family pictures and reproductions of newspaper photos and headlines. Reading Hynes’ accounts of strikes, placid summer amusements and local murders is like paging through the musty black-and-white pages of old Life magazines. His book is as valuable for the local history it preserves as for the personal insights it reveals.

The Depression endowed Hynes with an economic outlook that will seem strange to those who are accustomed to maxing out their credit cards. “Spending isn’t a gift you’re born with,” he says, “you have to learn how to be extravagant. On my birthday, one of those kid years, I was given two dollars and told to buy a toy. I walked all the way to the Sears store on Lake Street and spent an hour or more moving slowly along the counters of the toy department, looking at every single thing there. I didn’t want any of them. . . . But I was supposed to spend my two dollars and so finally, desperately, I bought a Detective Set . . . and walked the long walk home crying, because I had spent my money for something I didn’t want and didn’t need.” Another element younger readers may find quaint but which will be instantly recognizable to older ones is Hynes’ slow and circuitous introduction to the joys of sex from listening to deliciously misinformed playground chatter and peeking through a neighbor girl’s window to the inevitable letdown of first consummation. Hynes is at his best when he moves from description to emotional substance, as he does here in relaying how he felt after his stepmother gave away the train set she thought he’d outgrown. “I felt my loss bitterly. It wasn’t grief, exactly. [It was] more like what you feel when a favorite thing is smashed, or swept away by a stream, or dropped from a moving car onto a highway. . . . Something that was yours is gone forever; and if that can happen, if this thing you treasured can be taken away from you, then everything can.” In our need to reverse such losses, we write memoirs. Or read them.

<B>Battling the Alzheimer’s beast</B> There may be little grace mined from the back-breaking, ever-shifting process of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, but searing, sometimes soulful nuggets of epiphany occasionally surface during the process. Novelist Eleanor Cooney has woven keen insights, beloved memories and painful despair into a new memoir, <B>Death in Slow Motion: My Mother’s Descent into Alzheimer’s</B>. This brutally honest chronicle, rich with darkly humorous metaphor, relates the author’s desperate battle to save her mother from "the beast called Alzheimer’s." Cooney’s movable lens of memoir switches between her childhood and adult years, and we come to know her beautiful, brilliant and witty mother, East Coast writer Mary Durant. She "was a racehorse raring to run. She wanted action. She wanted flash and glamour." Complex, charming and gifted, she was also a woman who very much desired and was desired by men. After the heartbreaking early death of her third husband, the love of her life, Durant was profoundly depressed and chronically grieving. This, Cooney believes, was the true fundament of her mother’s disease: "I think grief literally burned out the circuits of my mother’s brain." We travel with Cooney as she navigates, with the dubious help of drugs and alcohol, the rough road deep into Alzheimer’s territory: the stunned initial coping, the difficult but hopeful care-giving and the agonizing realization of defeat ending in a beloved mother’s institutionalization. This is not a self-help book for those dealing with Alzheimer’s, but a truthful portrayal of the dreary and heartbreaking realities of the disease, especially the confusing search for caregiver support and an affordable, compassionate and clean care facility.

Cooney’s memoir does not end in death, but with an affirmation of life. At one point, the nursing facility calls to relate that Mary Durant has been found sharing the bed of a male resident, sleeping soundly and attired only in a shirt. Says the nurse, " . . . they’re adults, and they still have desires." Cooney laughs, giddily exuberant that part of her mother’s organic essence, her physical desire, has resurfaced. Another light still shining, not yet extinguished.

<I>Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.</I>

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.