She was known for Technicolor aquatic musicals, in which she emerged from lavishly adorned swimming pools on underwater hydraulic lifts nary a drop of running mascara, her hairdo marvelously intact. Over the years Esther Williams’s watery movies have become kitsch classics. But as her entertaining autobiography reveals, there was more to the career and the personal life than water. At a time when women were not known for athletic ability, Williams was the U.S. 100-meter freestyle champ hoping for a chance at the Olympics when she was recruited by showman Billy Rose to appear in his Aquacade at the San Francisco Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1939. Later, when wartime ended her Olympic hopes, she worked as a stock girl and sometime model. But she was also wooed by MGM, which wanted to launch a series of swimming pictures that would rival 20th Century-Fox’s ice-skating odes to Sonja Henie.

In titles like Neptune’s Daughter and Dangerous When Wet, Williams displayed athleticism, beauty, and accessibility. Along with behind-the-scenes tales (Gene Kelly was a creep to work with; Van Johnson a sweetheart), she dishes about the studio’s unforgettable stars Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, and Bette Davis. She also recounts her own dalliances, which included romances with actors Victor Mature and Jeff Chandler. She recounts that Chandler, known for his rugged Westerns, surprised her with the revelation that he was a secret cross-dresser. Along with flouncy chiffon dresses, he owned lots of polka-dotted attire. Therefore Williams left him with a fashion tip: Jeff, you’re too big for polka dots. Pat H. Broeske is a biographer of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

It’s easy to tell that the Presidential campaign for the 2000 election is starting to heat up just visit the local bookstore. It has become something of a prerequisite that a candidate come up with a volume to sell in the months of the campaign.

Some of the books are straightforward autobiographies. Others are statements on policy. And almost all will wind up in the remainder section shortly after the Presidential election next year if not sooner.

Therefore it’s good to see a candidate book that is worth reading: Faith of My Fathers, by Senator John McCain of Arizona, with Mark Salter. This is a memoir of the McCain family’s association with the United States Armed Forces, which goes back for many years. The connection actually can be traced back for a majority of the country’s history, although McCain is content to start with his grandfather and work his way to his own story.

The eldest McCain was one of the top military leaders in the Pacific theater in World War II, and he was on the USS Missouri the day the Japanese surrendered. His son was a submarine commander during that war, and eventually worked his way up the ranks until he also became an admiral and leader of the U.S. forces throughout the Pacific.

While those sections of the book are reasonably interesting, the interest level picks up several notches when the youngest McCain himself enters the military and is shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. He was a prisoner of war until 1973. McCain spares few details in describing what those five-plus years were like: torture, solitary confinement, poor food, lack of medical treatment.

McCain is a little hard on himself during his description of his time in captivity, perhaps because he was aware of the high standards set by his ancestors. His experiences, as described in the book, don’t necessarily qualify him for the nation’s highest office, but his book certainly gives a needed look at a slightly buried part of our history.

Budd Bailey is a hockey reporter and editor for the Buffalo News, and a contributor to The Sporting News.

Before Eddie Fisher took his place in history as Elizabeth Taylor’s most famous cuckold, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the pop music pantheon with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett. Been There, Done That is Fisher’s own account of the meteoric rise and painfully long decline of his career.

Edwin Jack Fisher, the son of Russian Jews, was born in Philadelphia in 1928. Although his family was poor and his parents dysfunctional, Fisher found refuge and comfort in his remarkable singing voice. He began performing on radio when he was still in junior high, and by the time he was 15, he says, he was earning more money than his hard-working father. His radio shows and appearances in the Catskills quickly revealed Fisher as a talent to watch. He signed with RCA Records and, after a few false starts, had his first hit, Thinking Of You, in 1950, when he was 22 years old. He boasts that he had more consecutive hit records than the Beatles or Elvis Presley (which is demonstrably untrue) but he did rack up three No. 1’s and 16 Top 10’s during his 17 years on the charts.

As Fisher tells it, his attention to his career began faltering when he and Debbie Reynolds started dating. Their short and unhappy marriage was doomed, he insists, long before he began his much criticized affair with Elizabeth Taylor. He remains bitter and contemptuous toward Reynolds, but recalls with fondness his passionate marriage to Taylor. That marriage, also brief, ended abruptly when she dropped Fisher for her Cleopatra co-star, Richard Burton. Taylor’s incessant illnesses, as well as her flagrant infidelity, took further toll on Fisher’s work.

In spite of his outsized ego, Fisher is uproariously self-deprecating when he hits his story-telling stride a few chapters into the book. He is candid about his drug addictions, his failures as a father and husband, his indifference to the quality of songs he recorded, his ineptitude as an actor, and his appetite for beautiful women. On this last note, he claims affairs with Ann-Margaret, Marlene Dietrich, Connie Stevens (whom he also married), Kim Novak, Judith Exner, Juliet Prowse, Stefanie Powers, Mia Farrow, Angie Dickinson, and many more. Edward Morris is a book publisher and journalist.

ere is a book written in the language of hurt, learned from childhood and refined through years of intensive education, both by the world he lives in and the person he is.

Nasdijj, whose pen name in the Athabascan tongue means “to become again,” was born on the Navajo Reservation, the son of a “white cowboy daddy,” and a mother “whose people were with the Navajo.” Migrant workers, they were “always going somewhere else,” but their nomadic existence was the least of his teachers. Far more pivotal in his life were the unaccountable contradictions of his father’s physical and emotional abuse, his mother’s alcoholism, their story-telling, their song-singing, and his own mixed heritage.

Nasdijj admits he “cannot account for the demons of adults,” and wants “the good things to blot out the bad things,” but they don’t always. The mineral traces of his experiences show up time and time again in the “blood that runs like a river” through his imagination. The chapters of this memoir can be read alone with a certain amount of emotional constraint, but taken together they carry the pain from a hundred tributaries and spill into an ocean of barely dammed despair.

In his modified, stream-of-consciousness bravado, Nasdijj never just treads water. He dives into it, and spits it out.

Homelessness, horses, the San Francisco Tenderloin, the Navajo Long Walk Home, fishing all these and more figure one way or another in his own trail of tears, but most unforgettable is the death of his six-year-old adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, from fetal alcohol syndrome. “I was so damn determined I would do good by Tom. Tommy was my sweet revenge. That he could experience joy and all the good things that make life worth living was my salvation. Now he is gone. Writing is my new revenge.” It’s an uneven trade, but in the end, Nasdijj gives us a sad, wild, vital world, beholden to history and nature, that will never surrender either its better spirits, or its devils.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

Ladies and gentleman, a man who needs no introduction for once this overused line is true. Practically everybody knows who Stephen King is, so we’ll skip the biographical stuff. Do you want to write popular fiction? Then you need to read On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. There are other categories of people who may profit from this friendly book: those who don’t aspire to a writing career but who nevertheless find the process interesting, those who enjoy candid personal memoirs, and those who want to learn more about Stephen King. Added up, these categories probably come to half the human race, so it seems that King has done it again.

On Writing is indeed a memoir of the craft as practiced by one of the most popular authors in history. It is pure Stephen King slangy, energetic, sloppy, unexpected, vulgar, and impressively frank. It begins with some of King’s horrifc memories of early childhood, including his abuse at the hands of a babysitter and his excruciatingly painful treatments for ear infections. He describes his early interest in reading, particularly about horrors, and his natural tendency to write the sort of things he read. As in much of his nonfiction, King seems to be chatting about his enthusiasms over a beer with a friend.

You will find the author speculating on why he’s drawn to the graveyard side of fiction instead of the domestic comedies and family melodramas on the sunny side of the street. However, King doesn’t delve too deeply into his own psyche, for fear of jinxing his muse. His theme throughout On Writing is that you must trust your instincts and write about whatever moves and interests you not what you think others might want, and not what you think might sell. Of course, King knows he’s not Tolstoy or Proust, and he makes a clear-headed appraisal of his own talents. King discusses dialogue, description, motivation, and imagery. Surprisingly, he is skeptical of the need for plot. He wants the characters to move the story. Perhaps he’s more literary than he realizes.

Like all of the better guides, Stephen King’s On Writing inspires the reader to create. "Writing," King says flatly, "isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well."

Eleanor’s Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son, and Her Secret Adoption is an ancient arrangement dating back to biblical times and probably even earlier. Even so, it was not until the 1850s that adoption was legally recognized in the United States, and decades later, in the 1930s, that laws were created to ensure the confidentiality of adoption participants. Of the 87,250 children born to unwed mothers in 1935, many were placed with orphanages to be adopted. David Siff was among them. In 1975, when he wanted to make his own astrological chart, Siff needed the exact minute of his birth; it was this quest that lead him to a secret more revealing than the stars. Not only did Siff learn at the tender age of 40 that he was adopted, he also learned that the woman who adopted him was the birthmother who had placed him in the orphanage just a year before. The author’s biological father died before the secret was out, but Siff eventually uncovers another startling fact about his heritage: his father was none other than stage and film star Van Heflin. At the mercy of somewhat unwilling biological relatives to understand the father he never met, Siff turns to his father’s celluloid surrogate for clues. Siff repeatedly watches Heflin’s movie performances (including those as Joe Starrett in Shane and as a mad bomber in the 1970 movie Airport ) in a desperate attempt to learn more about his father, and to understand his mother’s secret. Siff’s winding journey, a mid-life discovery process if not an all-out crisis, examines how the layers of his family were folded and shifted to cover up his mother’s rebellious decision to reclaim her son from the orphanage. As he examines the fabric of his family, the author finds that the secret affected his mother even more than it did himself. With a thorough and thoughtful examination, Siff reveals that the emotional effects of adoption, like the ripples from a pebble dropped into a pond, have no concrete border. Though difficult to measure over time, the ramifications are life-altering for many in the extended circle.

An actor and journalist, Siff has also written several books on sports under the name David Falkner.

Diane Stresing is a freelance writer in Kent, Ohio.