Writer Ann Patchett always knew in an intellectual sense what a hard time her friend Lucy Grealy had confronting the world with a face disfigured by cancer and the horrific treatments that followed. But it may not have truly come home to her until she visited Lucy in Scotland, where she was having yet another complicated, ultimately unsuccessful reconstructive surgery. This time, the treatment had caused Lucy's face to swell like a balloon. And some of the local lads made no pretense at being polite. One of many incidental encounters with drunken louts: "They barked and screamed to be helped, rescued, saved. Save me from the dog girl!,' they cried . . . I let go of Lucy's arm and ran into them screaming, smacking, shoving blindly into all there was to hate." Lucy knew that all too many people saw her as a freak because of her appearance. It wounded her psyche, and helped lead to her early death from drug abuse in 2002. But she did have the creative talent to turn her experience into a successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face. And she had friends like Patchett, who has now memorialized Lucy in the lyrical, lovely Truth & Beauty.

Patchett, the author of Bel Canto and other critically acclaimed novels, met Lucy in college, but became her friend in the University of Iowa's famous creative writing program. Patchett describes herself as the careful ant and Lucy as the grasshopper too casual about sex, bills, booze, but always brilliant, always entertaining. They loved each other.

At first, they sustained one another through the typical travails of young writers, the scramble for grants, fellowships, contacts. But as Lucy's life spiraled out of control and Patchett's stabilized, Patchett found herself trying to save her friend. Inevitably, she failed. No one could have succeeded: Lucy lived in a vast cavern of loneliness.

Lucy was unable to finish any substantial writing after Autobiography, but Patchett liberally quotes her letters, all filled with insight and keen intelligence. Patchett has preserved her friend's talent in this book, and provided more evidence of her own.

As a chubby nine-year-old, Lynne Cox was the slowest kid in the pool. But she loved swimming, so she kept plugging away at it. When the coach ordered her class out of the water because a storm was brewing, she got permission to keep swimming. When hail started falling, Cox kept swimming alone in a pool full of ice.

Scientists would later determine that her unique ratio of muscle to body fat made her anomalously suited to swimming long distances in water so cold, it would kill an ordinary swimmer within minutes. At 15, Cox swam the English Channel, breaking the world record. The next year, she went back to England and broke the record again.

It would be a mistake to think that Cox's new autobiography, Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, is of interest only to swimmers. In fact, the book has more in common with heroic literature of the ancient world like Beowulf and The Odyssey than with the typical athlete's success story. Like those ancient heroes, Cox isn't satisfied with races that have a designated course. Instead, she looks for unique athletic challenges that only she can overcome. That's why, at 17, she fell out of love with channel swimming and, instead, took on the unknown swimming icy lakes, straits and channels that had been thought impossible for a swimmer to breach. Her famous 1987 swim across the Bering Sea from Alaska to the Soviet Union took 10 years to plan, and the water, in August, was barely above freezing.

Although Cox isn't a professional writer, she has a keen eye for details that turn an important life experience into an entertaining story. Readers will be amused, for instance, by the English cab driver who told Cox she was too fat to swim the Channel as he was driving her to the beach for that express purpose.

While other athletes were wooed by corporate sponsors, Cox had to finance her own projects. Her story is a powerful account of clinging hard to a bigger dream.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

One week into his job as an errand boy at The New York Times in 1944, Arthur Gelb got his first taste of big-time newspapering when the Allies invaded France on D-Day. It was the beginning of a love affair that lasted beyond his mandatory retirement as managing editor of the Times 45 years later. In City Room, a memoir that moves as fast as a reporter typing at deadline, he recalls scores of significant events in the life of his city, nation and newspaper.

Gelb takes us from his early days in the city room when a horse-playing managing editor hired bookies as clerks so they would be nearby. We get a firsthand account of how the newspaper battled authorities in developing such blockbuster scoops as the Pentagon Papers, which revealed government deception about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and the Officer Frank Serpico series, which uncovered deep-seated corruption in the N.Y.C. Police Department. Having seen a number of other dailies shuttered by economic pressures, demographic changes and labor strikes, the Times found its own existence threatened in the mid-1970s. Gelb led the way in giving a facelift to the Gray Lady, a nickname adopted by critics to note the newspaper's staid appearance. Using text, headlines and pictures in more imaginative ways than ever before, Gelb helped to create weekly theme sections on such subjects as science, lifestyles and weekend activities. Readers and advertisers responded in large numbers to the revitalized newspaper.

Gelb insists the newspaper always stressed a culture of accuracy and fairness that made the Times the gold standard of journalism in the pre-Jayson Blair years. This fascinating account of the newspaper's recent history, which ought to be required reading for journalism students, is highly recommended for everyone.

Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that the first book to leave a lasting impression on that sorcerer of fiction was The Thousand and One Nights. This is just one of many glorious details the Colombian-born Nobelist, who put magical realism on the world's literary map with his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, shares in the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale.

Garcia Marquez is one of those writers who is frequently described as beloved, and this autobiography has been a huge bestseller around the globe in its original Spanish. Now elegantly translated into English by Edith Grossman, the book is at last available to those of us who do not read the author's native tongue.

Just as he might start one of his novels, Garcia Marquez begins his narrative with a journey. He is in his early 20s, living in Barranquilla and scratching out a living as a journalist, when his mother appears one day out of the blue at a bookstore where he often hangs out. As the eldest son, he must accompany her to the town of Aracataca to close the deal on the sale of the family home. The uncomfortable journey via boat and train is fraught with mishaps, and the young man spends a good part of it assuaging his mother's concerns about his decision to drop out of university to become, of all things, a writer. The whole misbegotten venture ends with a muddle that leaves the house unsold, but for Garcia Marquez it proves the catalyst for this larger journey into the past.

Though he mostly sticks with chronology when relating the story of his life, Living to Tell the Tale is anything but linear. One memory casually sparks another, leading him to a colorful digression about some other event or character. Character is the operative word here, for the real people who surrounded him were as singularly eccentric as anyone he has created in his fiction. "I cannot imagine a family environment more favorable to my vocation than that lunatic house," he admits, "in particular because of the character of the numerous women who reared me." If his grandmother and aunts encouraged piety, his grandfather, known as "the Colonel," encouraged freedom of expression, at one point having a wall in his office painted white with the express purpose of providing a fresh canvas for preschool-age Gabriel's wall scribblings. The Colonel's own freedom of expression had resulted in nine illegitimate children. When all the sons descend on the house one Ash Wednesday to pay their respects, imaginative little Gabriel thinks that the crosses they all bear on their foreheads are some kind of family imprimatur, and he is sorely disappointed later to learn the truth.

His father was a homeopathic pharmacist who disappeared for long periods of time, leaving his mother with 11 children to raise. But Garcia Marquez's memories are anything but bleak, for everyone in his world was relatively poor and struggling, and pleasures were found wherever possible. Later, working as a journalist in Bogota, he weathers his country's political upheavals with the same sense of equilibrium. It is around the time of the popular uprising of April 9, 1947, that he reconnects with the girl he has known since childhood who will become his wife. This chapter of the story ends with Garcia Marquez on a plane headed for Geneva, writing a letter to Mercedes asking her to be his bride. Like the trip that launched the book, this seems to be another symbolic journey, as he embarks on the part of his life that will turn him into a citizen of the world.

So much of what Garcia Marquez lived in these early years would feed his fiction, and Living to Tell the Tale is a delightful companion to those incomparable novels and stories. It covers just the first third of his life, but the now 76-year-old Garcia Marquez has promised two more volumes of memoirs. For our sake, may he live to tell those tales, as well.

Robert Weibezahl's new book, A Second Helping of Murder: More Diabolically Delicious Recipes from Contemporary Mystery Writers has just been published by Poisoned Pen Press.

In 1942, New York Times war correspondent Byron “Barney” Darnton died while covering World War II in the Pacific. His son John Darnton was only 11 months old when Barney was killed by a piece of shrapnel.

The younger Darnton’s Almost a Family, in which he traces the irrevocable effects of his father’s death, can best be described as an investigative memoir. Darnton spends the first half of the book describing a childhood without a stable male influence before devoting another chunk to recreating the memory of a man he barely knew. Overall, it’s a poignant look at one man’s efforts to put the pieces of his shattered family back together.

After Barney died, the parenting responsibilities fell to John’s mother, Eleanor. The family’s unexpected second act starts promisingly before a failed news service and raging alcoholism cause Eleanor to unravel, forcing John and his older brother, Bob, to adapt. Before their mother’s recovery, John is shuffled to the homes of sympathetic relatives and neighbors, forced to become independent far too soon.

The author turns out just fine, becoming a novelist and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, his father’s beloved stomping grounds. Darnton then uses those award-winning reporting skills to reconstruct his parents’ past, especially that of his father, who displayed an unquenchable thirst for women and was ill-prepared for the events that unfolded on his last day.

What makes Almost a Family so attractive despite its flaws—the younger Darnton’s newspaper days slow the narrative, and the shift from memoir to reporting is distracting—is that no matter how many questions you ask or how much research you uncover, the dead can’t be defined. “We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one-thousandth of what we were lasts,” he writes. “We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up onshore.”

Darnton’s search for answers isn’t weepy abandonment entertainment; it’s the real deal, and one from which many readers will gain solace.

The 28th child of a Mormon father who married 16 wives and sired 48 offspring, author Dorothy Allred Solomon shares the story of her fundamentalist upbringing in her compelling new memoir. Although it contains moments of lightness, Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk has none of the whimsy the title suggests. Because the practice of plural marriage was both illegal and officially outlawed by the Mormon church long before her birth in 1949, Solomon lived her early years in the shadows and on the run. And because fiercely held but unpopular beliefs are innately volatile, this one ultimately cost her father his life.

Yet, in spite of all the troubles she chronicles, Solomon's recollections of her father the naturopathic physician Rulon C. Allred are suffused with warmth and affection. Her descriptions of the natural beauty of Utah rise to the level of poetry. Solomon has an extraordinary memory for childhood incidents and feelings. When coupled with material gleaned from family journals, it enables her to recreate not simply her own growing-up but also an incredibly rich and convoluted social order that has seldom been depicted from the inside. In Solomon's eyes, her father was not the insatiable master of an ever-expanding harem, as outsiders may have viewed him, but rather the conscientious, hard-working and besieged CEO of a generally harmonious community. There were many sources of disharmony beyond the community, however. While it had once enshrined polygamy as a divine commandment, the Mormon church now viewed it as an embarrassment and a political liability. Those who, like Allred, broke away from the church often fought viciously among themselves. To shield their parents, the children were taught to evade and dissemble.

Throughout her turbulent youth which included a rape, her father's murder and an early marriage Solomon was able to maintain a stabilizing sense of detachment. Without condemning it outright, she concluded early on that plural marriage was not for her and, in so doing, began her slow and uneasy assimilation into the outside world.

Some funny things happened to Carl Reiner on his way to the Television Academy Hall of Fame. He's collected them in My Anecdotal Life, a backstage tour of his stellar career as one of show business's most creative minds. Instead of presenting a chronological autobiography with his new book, Reiner offers his reminiscences "in the order that they popped into my head," resulting in what he calls a literary "variety show." While that approach makes it easy on the writer, it also makes it easy on the reader, and as a result we get a breezy and delightful memoir.

In 1939, when he was a 17-year-old machinist's helper, Reiner—proud of his ability to make funny faces and belch at will—enrolled in a free government-sponsored drama class. That was the first step of a career that has reaped a trunkful of Emmys and a Grammy. In this book, he recounts his writing and acting days with zany Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows, which kept TV watchers in stitches during the 1950s. Reiner, who directed numerous films, including Oh, God! and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, also takes a backward look at his creation, The Dick Van Dyke Show, which turned Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore into superstars.

We learn that Reiner and Mel Brooks were dubious about their signature 2,000 Year Old Man routine. It was a howling success at private parties, but they felt its ethnic flavor would limit broad appeal. All doubt vanished when Cary Grant reported that, when the record was played in Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II "roared."

In addition to recalling some tender family moments, Reiner tells how he tried to teach a resisting Mickey Rooney to cross his eyes for the role of a character named Cockeye, and how he led a group that included Eva Marie Saint, Theodore Bickel, Alan Arkin and Jonathan Winters in a serious game of ring-around-the-rosey. These and plenty of other celebrity-filled stories will make the reader smile, chuckle or guffaw—which, after all, is exactly what Carl Reiner always aims to do.