Now we are together for the first time. We have actually become, as is often said of a happily married couple, inseparable, John Bayley writes of his current life with his wife Iris Murdoch. Murdoch, one of Britain’s most learned and noted novelists, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and Bayley’s Elegy for Iris recounts their marriage in two sections tellingly named Then and Now. Togetherness, and the struggles the couple have with their peculiar brand of inseparability are Bayley’s themes in his moving memoir. Bayley describes his romance with Murdoch with nostalgia, hearkening back to scenes of Oxford dons and bicycling around campus. After a dance, the two return to Bayley’s apartment and begin to get acquainted, foreshadowing the extraordinary vulnerability and strength that will characterize their life together. She seemed to be giving way to some deep need of which she had been wholly unconscious: the need to throw away not only the maneuvers and rivalries of intellect but also the emotional fears and fascinations, the power struggles and surrenders of adult loving, Bayley writes. As he illustrates the beginnings of their love affair, Bayley never lets the present escape entirely, reminding the reader that Alzheimer’s sufferers are not always gentle: I know that. But Iris remains her old self in many ways. Past and present are intertwined, imbuing Bayley’s narrative with a sense of completeness. Throughout the narrative, Alzheimer’s and its repercussions are never distant from even the most long-ago recollections.

With the image of a vibrant, younger Iris pedaling around Oxford in mind, scenes in the Now portion of his memoir seem poignant, but never saccharine. Bayley writes of Iris’s love for the Teletubbies, her insistence on wearing trousers to bed, how difficult is it to travel with someone who keeps asking Where are we going? and can never remember the answer. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley demonstrates their experience as not necessarily negative, but alternative to most people’s experiences of aging. As Bayley reminds us, She is not sailing into the dark: The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s, she has arrived somewhere. So have I. Eliza McGraw is a graduate student in Nashville, Tennessee.

Combining autobiographical accounting with near-poetic turns of phrase, Laura Shaine Cunningham tells the story of how she came to love and own a home in the country. The country, for Cunningham, is first in Tuxedo Park, New York, about 40 miles from the city, and then at another home, the Inn, on an estate called Willowby. Her own vantage point as a city girl imbues A Place in the Country with the longing and expectations urban dwellers have for the beauty and peace of more rural settings.

Cunningham ranges all over her own biography, from adopting a daughter in China to her own experiences at summer camp. Her varying descriptions of places dear to her could have been disjointed, but instead all cohere through an understanding of the importance of place in general, and of the sanctity of a home. She creates fictional names for the privacy-loving neighbors at Willowby, and describes the disappointment of seeing how rundown her summer camp was with a keen memory of a child’s desire for something beautiful. In A Place in the Country, Cunningham writes about people as well as places. Stories of the individuals connected with the Inn (some of which have appeared in The New Yorker) happily populate the anecdotes Cunningham relates. These include the English Lord and Lady who live in the manor on the Inn’s property. Cunning-ham describes her first meeting with the Lord and Lady as a cross between Hay Fever and The Bald Soprano. Tales of Cecil, the handyman, are at once funny and acute; as Cunning-ham writes, The single drawback to Cecil was that he was deaf. So when I screamed,

A Widow, A Chihuahua, and Harry Truman is an unusual memoir of grief and recovery. Mary Beth Crain, a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in publications such as Redbook and Cosmopolitan, recounts the story of her too-brief marriage, her husband’s death, and her debilitating depression afterward. She describes her rehabilitation under the guidance of two Harry Trumans the President and the Chihuahua.

Crain was happily married for three years when her husband died of cancer. On the Christmas Eve after his death, Crain was in despair until she was guided to a pet store under rather mysterious and remarkable circumstances. She bought a Chihuahua puppy and named him after her hero, Harry Truman. From this point on, Crain weaves together the two emotional themes of her book: While continuing to mourn her husband’s death, she was falling in love with her new puppy. She reveals how, as she passed through the stages of grieving and letting go, Truman’s devotion and playfulness kept her involved in life and made her laugh. Crain shares the joys and trials of taking home a new pet. The tension in her household escalated after she introduced the puppy to her three hostile and imperious cats. As Truman expanded his social circle, Crain was amazed at the ups and downs of doggy romance, and she and Truman were forced to endure humiliating failure at obedience school. Crain’s patience was challenged when an adolescent Truman decided that being housebroken was boring. Every day Truman brought chaos and craziness into Crain’s life and kept her distracted from her sadness. Throughout the book, Crain reflects on the indomitable spirit and tenacity of her puppy’s namesake, President Harry Truman. As she moved through this difficult time in her life, she was inspired by President Truman’s life and words, and each chapter begins with a bit of practical advice from the man from Independence.

Mary Helen Clarke is a writer and editor in Nashville.

The rise of Silicon Valley is the background for Sunnyvale, a moving autobiography by author and Rolling Stone contributor Jeff Goodell. This poignant story is less an analysis of the triumph and transformation of Silicon Valley than an intimate portrait of how those changes affected one family. In the opening chapters, Goodell describes his idyllic childhood in a small town whose very name suggests optimism. The oldest of three children, Goodell enjoys the privileges of middle-class upbringing a comfortable home, good schools, a hobby of racing motorcycles. Goodell’s youthful aspirations for a career as a pro cycle racer end at an early age, however, when he is seriously injured in an accident. This setback causes Goodell for the first time to recognize that Sunnyvale life is not charmed.

This realization proves prophetic, as the reader follows Goodell through the surprising decision of his parents to divorce, and his brother’s squandering of his talents as a musician in a haze of drugs and alcohol. His father’s spirit and, later, health are broken by the dissolution of the family, and his brother spirals out of control, alternating between charm and rage, at times sleeping on the streets. Absorbing the narrative, the reader shares Goodell’s frustration, being unable to do anything but watch as his loved ones’ lives skid toward tragedy. Still, all is not sadness and woe. Following the divorce, his mother joins Apple Computer and becomes rich after the introduction of the revolutionary Macintosh. His sister, who as a child plays at Apple’s Cupertino offices, as an adult becomes a member of a high-tech startup. Goodell notes that in any harsh environment, some possess a greater ability to adapt than others. But adaptation is not the only alternative for Goodell. Although he held a job at Apple Computer long before the introduction of the Macintosh, Goodell rejects the software industry and pursues a career as a writer. He attends college in New York City significantly, far away from California geographically and socially meets and later marries a flashy and talented classmate, and eventually settles in upstate New York. Goodell avoids overt criticism of his birthplace and the industry that has made Sunnyvale among the hottest real estate in America. Indeed, he frequently expresses admiration for the loose corporate culture at companies like Apple. His own departure from a computer career was in part propelled by the button-down software drone image in vogue at older firms like IBM. However, in telling his story, he makes clear the impact of the high-adrenaline world of software startups and the impact of an influx of instant millionaires. He relates his surprise that, during a visit, he discovers a fruit stand he remembers from boyhood still in operation. He then ruefully discovers that the produce is now selling at an exorbitantly inflated prices, and Sunnyvale’s aquifer is tainted with toxic waste from runaway industry. Goodell’s honest and insightful account is sad at times. However, Sunnyvale is also an inspiring tale of social survival. Its very existence reminds the reader that success isn’t restricted to those with Internet stock options.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor in Indianapolis.

An odyssey is a voyage, literal or spiritual, usually marked by many changes of fortune. The odyssey of A Blessing Over Ashes might be described as a surprisingly smooth journey through time and terror. Traveling from war-torn Cambodian fields to the good ol’ USA and back, readers can expect to return safely, but slightly removed from the place in which they began. In his first book, 27-year-old Adam Fifield delivers a warm, fascinating, aching, and comforting account of his brother’s life an account as accurate as possible, given what the author admits he does not know. Integral to the story is Fifield’s acknowledgment that he cannot understand his brother as well as he would like; in spite of being raised together, the distance between the two is immense.

Fifield was an 11-year-old living in Vermont when the Cambodian boy came to be his adopted brother. Fifield was sure that Soeuth, born four years earlier in another world, didn’t belong anywhere. The first thing I thought was: I already have a brother who dismembers my action figures, gets food in his hair. . . . What if our new brother turned out to be some primitive living in our midst, building fires in our living room, sacrificing our cats? By taking us back and forth between rural Vermont and the children’s work camp of Wat Slar Gram, Fifield shows how vast the differences between two boys can be. While Fifield formed the concept of good versus evil largely by watching Star Wars, The Hobbit, and Bonanza, Soeuth was taught by the Khmer Rouge that he must forget his family, and smash the heads of the rich people (and) . . . work for the glorious revolution. Ten years after leaving Cambodia with papers that certified he was an orphan, Soeuth learned that his family was still alive. An old Cambodian proverb says, To live is to hope. While Soeuth’s hopes for himself, his family, and their reunion are never clear, the distance between his two lives shrinks as he travels over it. His journey is indeed an odyssey.

Diane Stresing is a freelance writer in Kent, Ohio.

When Mississippi author Willie Morris died in August of this year, President Bill Clinton said the nation had lost a national treasure. Of course, we lost more than that. We lost a piece of our collective soul.

No one expected Willie Morris to die, not yet anyway. Among the many gifts he left behind was his final book, My Cat Spit McGee. He never lived to see it published and that is a shame, for in some respects it is his best. Morris lived through some miserable years as he came to terms with a divorce, struggled to establish himself as a writer, and battled personal demons. In the final years of his life, however, he found love and contentment with a woman named JoAnne, whom he married in spite of her unrelenting love of cats.

It was in his relationship with JoAnne and Spit McGee, the cat he rescued from certain death, that he finally came to terms with his own mortality. On one level, the book is a humorous, old-soul wise story about a dog man learning to live in a household with a furry, white cat. But there is a second level. With My Cat Spit McGee, Morris did what Ernest Hemingway did with The Old Man and the Sea. He took a simple story and, with writing that is honest and true, wove it into a soulful allegory that is timeless in its wisdom and depth of feeling.

That was always Morris’s strength as a writer his soul. You could see it in his eyes, the way his feelings ran wide and deep like the Mississippi River. I first met Willie Morris in 1978, when he traveled to Mississippi from his home in Bridgehampton, New York, to promote his book, Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town. After interviewing him for a local newspaper, I asked him to autograph the book.

He did considerably more than that: Knowing that one of my goals was to someday write a book, he admonished me, within the confines of the title page of his book, to never give up in my efforts.

When I was a student in Ireland 20 years ago, many homes still did not have telephones, and central heating and reliable hot water were dicey commodities at best. Now, I’m told, even the most remotely situated Irish have cell phones, and huge chunks of American data processing work are farmed out to Irish computer operators. In such a short time, the last remnants of what had been a slower, more insular world are vanishing. These thoughts crossed my mind as I read The Last of the Name, a brief but evocative oral history that spans some seven generations of rural Irish life from the 18th century to the middle of our own. Edited by playwright Brian Friel (one of Ireland’s national treasures), the book collects the reminiscences of Charles McGlinchey, who spent nearly every day of his long life in a small community in County Donegal. They were recorded by a local schoolteacher in the 1940s and ’50s, not long before McGlinchey’s death at 93. McGlinchey was born in 1861, less than two decades after the potato famine that devastated Ireland. Though he lived through two world wars and the fight for Irish independence, he never mentions these historical events. Instead, his memories concentrate on the everyday comings and goings of his little corner of the world the semi-annual fair, the successions of parish priests, revenuer’s raids on illicit stills, and the intermarriages and squabbles between Catholic and Protestant families. In the great oral tradition, he shares stories of the olden times that he heard from those who came before him quintessentially Irish stories of spirits and spells, family devotion, religion, poetry, games, and, of course, emigration.

The Last of the Name is a bit like a family heirloom found among a grandparent’s belongings, passed down through many hands to reach our own. McGlinchey was a weaver by trade, and it seems appropriate to apply the metaphor of a tapestry to this memoir. As he adds his own stories to those of his father and grandfather, McGlinchey weaves a colorful cloth of memory, and leaves us a remarkable link to a disappearing way of life.

Robert Weibezahl studied at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin.

For more information, check out The Center for Public Integrity’s Web site at http://www.publicintegrity.org/main.html. Created in 1990, The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization in Washington that concentrates on ethics and public service issues.

 Philip Lee Williams freezes an idyllic moment in time with a nostalgic flair that could rival a Norman Rockwell print. The Silent Stars Go By: A True Christmas Story relates a southern, boy’s-eye view of the simple joys of a country Christmas. Set in Madison, Georgia, 1959, this charming memoir speaks of a time, pre-Nintendo, when a boy could still be pleased with oranges, Brazil nuts, and a few special toys. Williams’s descriptions of his love, at age nine, of holiday hymns, the smell of a freshly cut cedar tree, and a hometown football team that never seemed to lose impart plenty of sentimentality for an era lost. But don’t worry about drowning in over-the-top gushiness. Williams merely tells it like it was, and leaves it to the reader to mourn the passing of the good ol’ days.

You just had a sack lunch yesterday. This ain’t Outward Bound, you know. one hungry smokejumper to another. A smokejumper’s job description might read: Squelch forest fires by parachuting into them wearing 40 pounds of gear. Operations require days of primitive camping in hot, smoky areas. Rewards include near-death experiences, extreme sleep deprivation, broken bones and more interesting injuries, and knowing you’re the world’s best defense against forest fires.

In the late 1930s, someone in the Forest Service suggested parachuting firefighters into small blazes to stop them. After U.S. Army officials watched the first fire jumps in 1940, they quickly created the first airborne units for World War II. The Bureau of Land Management launched a jumping program in 1959, the same year Murry Taylor became a firefighter. Taylor became a smokejumper in 1965, and today he is the oldest active jumper, having dropped into more than 200 fires.

Taylor’s clean construction takes us straight to the jumpers’ camp, close enough to scoff at the tourist who suggests the jumpers take a flying vacation over Alaska because “it’s the best way to see the country,” and close enough to grind off tooth enamel waiting out a day on call when, alas, no fires need fighting. In plain and simple terms, Taylor describes the vastness of the fires, the land on which they feed, and the immense challenge faced by those who dare interfere with nature’s burning desires. He also refrains from embellishing the injuries so many jumpers experience; a good thing, since a description of bones popping as they land badly on hot Alaskan rocks needs no amplification. Taylor’s remembered, recalled, or recreated events are so neatly recounted that they sound like a friend’s “day at the office” stories; his dialogue and description of place are as accurate as a jumper’s safe landing. The book moves fast; read the short glossary of jumper terms in the back of the book first so as not to get lost in jumper-lingo. Then dive into the intense pleasure of Jumping Fire.

Diane Stresing is a freelance writer in Kent, Ohio.