omes down to fathers and sons, writes John O’Brien at the end of his first book, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. A skillfully written memoir about family relationships, O’Brien’s narrative explores the meaning of home and what it takes to find a geographical as well as spiritual center.

O’Brien’s story begins and ends on a July day in 1995, the day his father is to be buried in Philadelphia. Because of a longstanding estrangement, O’Brien won’t be at the funeral, yet he needs formal closure, so he makes a trip to Piedmont, West Virginia, his father’s birthplace. He is desperate, he says, "to understand my father’s life, if only to better understand my own." In the chapters between the day’s beginning and end, O’Brien deftly weaves memories, recollections and observations about his own life with those of Pendleton County, West Virginia, where he has lived with his wife and two children since 1984, in a town called Franklin, not far from Piedmont. The stories intertwine as O’Brien blends the threads into a narrative that is gentle and satisfying despite chronicles of personal difficulties and deep community fissures. The storms that bring discord and fear of outsiders to this mountain community are paralleled by storms that bring the same kind of fear and discord to O’Brien and his family. The aftermath may fade in time, but, for O’Brien’s family, the emotional scars remain forever in nightmares, distrust and anger.

O’Brien doesn’t discover what he sets out to find on that July day "the gulf of misunderstanding remained as wide as ever" but in his exploration of the geography and people of Appalachia, which he describes with deep understanding and reverence, and in his exploration of himself, which he accomplishes with unflinching, sometimes uncomfortable honesty, he does remember good times with his dad, and he does find answers to questions that many of us have about the meaning of home. A line of poetry by a writer whose name he cannot recall has special resonance for O’Brien: "My home is in my head." Carrying the poet’s thought one step further, he writes, "My home is the memory in my head." At the end of this moving memoir, O’Brien seems to have achieved understanding and peace, perhaps with his father’s help after all.

Temple West is a creative nonfiction writer in Norfolk, Virginia.

ing together meditation and travelogue in his insightful new nonfiction book Paradise, Larry McMurtry captains the reader through two very different worlds his parents’ long and rocky marriage and the remote Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. Disparate though these worlds might seem to be, the author laces them together snugly with an all-encompassing vision. Like every other paradise, he observes, marriage is an ideal that reality inevitably sullies. At home in Texas or afloat on the Pacific, he is acutely aware of Eden’s fragility. McMurtry begins this slim volume (160 pages) by describing his parents’ provincial and often bleak existence in west Texas, contrasting it unsentimentally with his own wanderlust. His father is dead and his mother is near death as he sets out on the voyage that will provide him with the solitude to reflect on this aspect of his past. After a stop in Tahiti, McMurtry boards the freighter Aranui, which ferries supplies to the far-flung Marquesas. His companions on the ship are well-heeled Europeans on the lookout for ever more exotic locales. As they pursue the primitive, they bring with them a lust for shopping and a zeal for self-improvement. For the most part, McMurtry is gentle in his treatment of his fellow Eden-seekers. But he admits that there is something troubling about them. “What is off-putting, finally,” he concludes, “is just the massed power of their money, the weight of which is so great that it produces a kind of indifference to the experience of those like the Marquesans who are radically different from themselves.” As befits a man who has had many of his books made into movies (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment), McMurtry depicts the islands through cinematically vivid long-shots and close-ups. From a distance, most of the islands look majestic and pristine. Closer in, the pores show cases of Coca-Cola stacked on the docks, kids listening to Sting in their Isuzu pickup trucks as they wait to perform native dances for the tourists. McMurtry doesn’t play the amused sophisticate that S. J. Perelman did in his hilarious 1948 travelogue Westward Ha!, but he does have a sharp eye for the absurd.

Returning from his tour, McMurtry watches kids cuddle with their parents in the Los Angeles airport and muses: “Perhaps that is paradise: the fresh, unqualified love of children for their moms and dads a love before knowledge, which was the sort of love the God of Genesis intended for Adam and Eve.” It is his paradise lost.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

Tony Earley crafts an elegant reinvention of the past The line between fiction and nonfiction is often blurred and in most cases arbitrarily drawn. In his new book, Somehow Form a Family, a collection of essays that reads like the cohering fragments of a memoir, Tony Earley walks gracefully along that line, writing about growing up in the South in the 1970s, the eccentricities of love in most families, and the essential longing to connect with a community that any writer feels but is rarely able to satisfy. "All writers are spies in their own country," Earley said in a recent phone interview. "We are afflicted or blessed with this strange sort of consciousness in which we are always looking in from the outside. I can remember being a kid walking through the playground, imagining myself as I did it, conscious of my every move, always feeling different and never comfortable in any group. Perhaps that’s why we become writers, to deal with that longing." Earley, a North Carolina native and an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of the 1994 short story collection Here We Are in Paradise and the highly acclaimed novel Jim the Boy, published in 2000. A few years back Granta magazine named him one of America’s best young authors, and shortly after that announcement, The New Yorker featured him in an issue that focused on the best new fiction writers in America. The last three stories in Here We Are in Paradise depicted Jim Glass and his family. From those stories, Earley developed the idea for the novel Jim the Boy, a work whose style has been compared to both Ernest Hemingway’s and E. B. White’s. Being compared to Hemingway would not come as an unwanted surprise to most young contemporary fiction writers, but a comparison to E. B. White, in our deconstructed new world where any writer worth his ink seems destined to have a distant, ironic voice, may not seem a compliment. Earley, though, is happy with the comparison and thinks he understands its source. "I started it," he said. "It’s flattering, but the comparisons probably came from my epigraph to the novel from White’s Charlotte’s Web

Miichael Korda’s Country Matters belongs to a genre of books chronicling the lives of urbanites who forsake the luxuries of the city for the unpredictable joys and frustrations of rural life. Some of these books, such as Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun and Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, have an international flair. Others, such as Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska’s Simple Living: One Couple’s Search for a Better Life, bring the tale a bit closer to home. Wherever they’re set, such books are appealing most obviously, perhaps, to those who have made the plunge into country life and those who dream of doing so, but also, truth be told, to just about anyone anywhere who has ever owned and maintained a home.

Korda’s manifestation of this tale begins with the day over 20 years ago when he and his wife bought an 18th century farmhouse in Dutchess County, 90 miles north of New York City. Up to that point, Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and a best-selling author, had been accustomed to living a cosmopolitan life, having been born in England and spending time in Europe and Beverly Hills before finally settling in New York City. He met his wife Margaret, who had been born into a farming family in England, while riding a horse through Central Park. Within a short time the two were married and searching for a place in the country where they could put down roots. Eventually, they found the house of their dreams and increasingly came to think of their country farmhouse as their home.

On one level, Korda’s book is a humorous look at what it takes to restore, repair and maintain an old house. The narrative’s real charm, however, lies in its depiction of the clash between Korda’s original notions of genteel country living and the realities of modern rural life. Dutchess County, the Kordas find, is no rural idyll. Yet, despite all of the differences between these urbanites and the rural culture that surrounds them, they gradually come to feel at home, and it is their transformation from outsiders to community members that lies at the story’s heart.

Vivian A. Wagner, Ph.D., writes from New Concord, Ohio.

Washington, Meg Greenfield’s posthumously published memoir, offers a behind-the-scenes look at life inside the Beltway. Though styled as a memoir, Washington is organized thematically rather than chronologically and except for a brief discussion of Greenfield’s childhood in Seattle (the other Washington) and her early 20s spent as a self-described "bohemian" in New York the book is almost entirely set in the nation’s capital. Greenfield, a reporter in Washington from 1971 until her death in 1999 and editor of the Washington Post op-ed page from 1979 onward, managed to live and work in the insular world of politicians and pundits without loosing her sense of proportion or her notorious sense of humor. She was known inside and outside the Beltway for her unique ability to identify the absurdities of politics and to laugh at them a skill repeatedly on display in this book.

Washington opens with a quotation from the British poet William Blake: "Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords Appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life." Greenfield’s view of Washington insiders more often than not accords with Blake’s view of English aristocrats. In fact, she begins her memoir by drawing a parallel between old England and contemporary Washington where "better-bred, country-house English remains the stylistic model, the affectation of choice." Greenfield directs her sharp-edged wit at the foibles, phoniness and hypocrisy of those around her with hilarious results. She describes her home city as overrun with men and women (mostly men) "who were extremely successful children . . . that whole range of smiling but empty-faced youth leaders who were universally admired, though no one could have told you for exactly what." The implication is that Washington insiders are somehow inhuman, too perfect to be real, or at least exceptionally skilled at feigning perfection. In his afterword, Green- field’s literary executor Michael Beschloss writes that the author left behind notes for a final chapter that would have focused more on her life as a child and on her time spent at her summer home in Maine. While the completed manuscript would probably have painted a more well-rounded picture of Greenfield, the finely honed skewering of Beltway life that she did complete is in itself well worth the read.

Laura Beers is a publicity assistant at Oxford University Press.

In 1965, poet and memoirist Kathleen Norris a shy, sheltered 17-year-old left her home in Hawaii and traveled several thousand miles to Bennington College in Vermont. As Norris recounts in The Virgin of Bennington, her fourth memoir, the distance between Honolulu and New England was more than geographical. Though academically rigorous, Bennington in the ’60s was a playground for wealthy, "artsy" girls, members of the various branches of the East Coast elite. "I had no idea," Norris says, ". . . that I was signing on for a crash course in the turbulent dynamics of place and culture." Overwhelmed by her peers’ hedonism affairs with professors and heavy drug use Norris retreated into herself, wrote poetry and critical essays, and earned a reputation as a prig. At 21, she was still a virgin, a complete anomaly at Bennington.

But after four years of college life, Norris succumbed; she developed a crush on a married professor a man who, she discovered years later, had engaged in countless affairs with students and doggedly pursued him. Her quest took her to New York, where she through the professor’s connections landed a dream job as the assistant to Betty Kray, then-director of the Academy of American Poets. When the affair fizzled, Norris was crushed; but the failed romance became, in a way, a windfall. For it drew Norris closer to Kray by all accounts an extraordinary woman, friend to every major mid-century poet and inventor of any number of innovative arts and education programs (as well as a talented writer herself, evidenced by the letters included in Norris’ book). Kray tutored Norris in everything from fashion to revision techniques to social etiquette and introduced her to James Wright, Diane Wakoski, Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard and a number of other poets. The book is filled with Norris’ appreciative remembrances of these luminaries who taught her, in essence, how to be a poet. "Even in casual conversation they often imparted great wisdom on the joys and demands of the writing life," Norris says. Populated with some of the 20th century’s most compelling writers, 0679455086 is a lively, jumbled tale full of literary history. Norris, author of the best-selling Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, has written a fascinating coming-of-age story.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the book editor for Shout magazine.