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.

Ten Thousand Sorrows is the autobiography of Elizabeth Kim, a journalist from Southern California who began her life with a harrowing incident witnessing the murder of her mother in Korea. Having disgraced the family by bearing a mixed-race child with an American G.I., Kim’s mother was hanged in an "honor-killing" conducted by her grandfather and uncle. As her mother explained to Kim, according to her own Buddhist beliefs, "life was made up of ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows, and all of them were stepping-stones to ultimate peace." Her mother’s fate, albeit tragic, was not atypical; Korean society, particularly during the Korean War era, was very unforgiving of interracial relationships, particularly with American G.I.s. Murder in these instances was considered justifiable, or, as in her mother’s case, was labeled as a suicide.

Having escaped the filth and neglect of a Korean orphanage, Kim is adopted into a strict fundamentalist family incapable of conveying warmth or compassion. She describes the stigma of not being accepted into either Korean society or her adopted American home. Leaving her American family behind, she falls into an abusive marriage with a "godly man" who forces her to suffer routine beatings and bear indignities such as sleeping in the doghouse with the family pet. Years of rejection cause her to feel unworthy of the love and acceptance she once had with her biological mother (her "Omma"); at this point, Kim’s life is full of shame and self-loathing. Despite the dark circumstances of her life, the book is imbued with hope, which is transferred to Kim from her mother and later embodied in Kim’s relationship with her own daughter. Carrying this heritage from her Omma, she realizes that the love and acceptance for which she was searching can be found within, the beginning of her stepping stone to peace.

Jeannie Q. Joe, a Korean American attorney, practices corporate law in Austin, Texas.

Perhaps still best known in this country for his portrayal of the unflappable gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves in the BBC/PBS Jeeves and Wooster series, Stephen Fry is a writer, actor, and comedian just the shady side of 40. He would admit that some of his life has been pretty shady indeed. It has also been so eventful and so worth musing upon that in this volume he gets only as far as his acceptance to Cambridge. The promise of a sequel is implicit, and anyone who enjoys the shenanigans, opinions, digressions, and divertissements of this, Fry’s first formally autobiographical book, will want to pressure him to write ever more quickly.

Fry has used his early life as literary material before. His novel The Liar gave us some idea of his turbulent years at an English public school and of his first love, for a fellow student. It is that mad love that stands at the center of this ruthlessly frank memoir. Coming with the full emotional chaos of puberty and to a boy already alienated from most of his schoolmates by a loathing of everything athletic this early passion helped unhinge Fry. In only a few years, he became a liar, a thief, a truant (he was ultimately expelled), and a near suicide. Yet, in a book bracingly free of recriminations and grudges, Fry blames no one for his crimes, misdemeanors, or adolescent unhappiness. One of Fry’s many targets for he is a sane and able polemicist is facile psychologizing, easy excuses, fuzzy thinking.

Fry addresses the reader directly, abandons chronology, flies onto tangents ranging from the sublime nature of music to lessons learned from E. M. Forster and Montaigne, engages in riotous wordplay, and charms with a wit like that of his hero Oscar Wilde. One of his schoolmasters once tagged him, ambivalently, as exuberant. That exuberance made this unique autobiography a huge bestseller in England and should win over a large, enthusiastic audience here.

Randall Curb is a writer in Greensboro, Alabama.

Fifty miles southwest of Houston, along what is now Highway 59, lies the coastal plains town of Wharton, Texas. One of its renowned residents lives today in the house his family first occupied when he was one year old. He is Horton Foote, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, playwright, and author. Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood is his latest work, a memoir of his south Texas childhood, covering the years 1916 through 1933.

Horton Foote, Jr. grew up surrounded by two large extended families, with two sets of grandparents and countless uncles, aunts, and cousins. Farewell, told through a series of anecdotes, tells of his education in the public schools, his talent for dramatic acting and academics, and his large family’s reach throughout the community. Foote sits at the feet of maiden aunts and drunken uncles to hear them recount times starting during the Civil War and continuing through to the Depression. His two uncles keep the family worried about their constant drinking and gambling. Foote’s father struggles to support his family as a shopkeeper. Throughout Foote’s childhood, family is the center of his life, as it is the center of Wharton.

The author presents scenes of the segregated South in the first half of the century, with stories of KKK meetings and a rural lynching. Black professionals of the town are lauded for their meek and polite manners, and are called a credit to their race. Foote recounts a time when black and white children routinely played together until school age, when segregation forced them apart. The everyday poverty of the cotton farmers and small shopkeepers serves as backdrop for Foote’s discussions of the Roosevelt era and the Democratic party so fervently supported by his father.

Foote graduates with honors from Wharton High School in 1932, eager to go off to New York to study acting and make his career on the stage. But his family’s poverty short circuits that dream, and he settles for the Pasadena Playhouse in California.

Foote’s writing is superb, clear, concise, and straightforward, as befits a son of Depression-era Texans. His presentation is almost journalistic in tone, never succumbing to emotion or pity when describing his family and his childhood. Known as the Chekov of the small town, Foote has always chosen home, family, and ordinary men for his subjects. In Farewell he does so again.

David Sinclair is a former English Literature teacher and reviewer in Wichita Falls, Texas.

With ‘Tis, Frank McCourt brings us the remarkable sequel to the Pulitzer prize-winning Angela’s Ashes. McCourt, as narrator and protagonist, picks up just where he left off, upon his arrival in New York as a young Irish immigrant. True to form, McCourt narrates his life adventure with the innocence of a young man fearful and alone in the world. We first find McCourt working to make ends meet at the Biltmore Hotel. There he interacts with kitchen workers, hotel staff, and guests, all of whom are from different backgrounds. This disparate bunch is made up of people of all ages, religions, classes, and nationalities. Though repeatedly warned to stick with your own kind, McCourt finds his true kinship with these lost young immigrants.

The narrative continues with McCourt finding his way in America through work and study. He receives what proves to be life-changing advice from Irish bar owner Tim Costello, who encourages the young McCourt to get an education. In one scene, Costello throws McCourt out of his bar because McCourt cannot identify Samuel Johnson, the English poet, lexicographer, and gentleman. (He then sends McCourt to the New York public library to read The Lives of the English Poets.) McCourt eventually becomes a high school teacher, teaching creative writing. He marries and begins a family. And he discovers a love for a popular Irish past-time drinking. Not one to overlook his own faults, McCourt recounts how his drinking takes its toll on his marriage. More than just the story of one man, ‘Tis is the continuation of the story of the McCourt family. There are powerful, tense scenes between McCourt and his father, who struggle to come to terms with a painful past, but there is much humor, too. With less misery than Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis provides the reader a funny and warm look at a young man coming of age and finding his voice.

A while back I had the pleasure of interviewing Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, who spoke not only about her writing but of her idyllic-sounding life on nearly 200 acres of farmland in New Hampshire with her husband, their sheep, dogs, and horses. Their utopia was shattered, however, on July 21, 1998, when an accident nearly killed Kumin. She was preparing for a horse show when her beloved horse bolted, dragging her along in a carriage, and in the end, breaking her vertebrae and causing other severe injuries. Ninety-five percent of such victims die before they reach the emergency room; of those who make it, 95 percent are paralyzed. Kumin was amazingly spared, mainly due to the on-the-spot efforts of her friend, an emergency room nurse.

Despite her luck, the writer’s recovery was long and torturous. Thankfully, Kumin’s gift for words hasn’t faltered. She recounts her excruciating recovery in Inside the Halo: The Anatomy of a Recovery (the halo is the device that kept her head immobile as the broken vertebrae healed).

Inside the Halo is short and fast-paced. Kumin manages to be frank without ever getting lost in self-pity. She was obviously brave, but never makes herself out to be a hero.

Kumin draws strength to keep going from friends and family, especially her daughter, Judith, who took a leave from her position as a United Nations press officer. She is also bolstered by other rehabilitation patients, primarily her roommate, 21-one-year old Nicole, who fell off a ladder and lost the use of her legs. Though age separates them by decades, Kumin and Nicole find themselves to be kindred spirits.

One of Kumin’s doctors pronounces her a walking miracle and suggests she consider her recovery a rebirth. Kumin confesses that Getting better was such an ordeal; by contrast, death looked so easy. But by the spring after her accident, life on the farm is starting to spring forth, and Kumin feels ready to rejoin her world. She remounts the horse that nearly killed her, saying, I am letting myself believe I will heal. Alice Cary writes from her home in Groton, Massachusetts.

From our archives: the 1999 photo memoir from Dunne, who died at age 83 on August 26.
Dominick Dunne, author of such best-selling novels as The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and An Inconvenient Woman, gets behind the camera, literally and figuratively, as he dishes the dirt on his Hollywood and society cronies in this deliciously tawdry volume.

The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper is aptly subtitled, since the author spends most of the pages talking about the fabulous people he has met throughout a long, if not always distinguished, career in the film and television industries. Dunne’s photographs of the rich and famous are a major component of the book. The snapshots of family and friends are at least as entertaining as the text.

Dunne was born into a well-heeled family in Connecticut, went to the right schools, met the right people, married the right woman. He decided at a young age what he wanted to do with his life: I had always been star-struck, one of those kids who preferred movie magazines to baseball cards. His early days as a stage manager opened many doors. Life became a series of parties and get-togethers with the likes of Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Roddy McDowell, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and countless others. And, to be fair, the social circles included not just the stars, but those around them hairstylists, chauffeurs, and secretaries are treated with respect and affection as well.

But Dunne writes not only of the good times. He imparts, with painful honesty, how he got caught up in the drug culture of the ’60s. That, coupled with the breakup of his marriage, carried him down into a period of desperation. The bottom fell out when he was arrested for trying to smuggle marijuana across the Mexican border. Though he managed to avoid incarceration, he fell out of favor with those with whom he had found such fascination and entertainment. To paraphrase Dunne: There is no sin except failure. The ostracism sent him to the brink of suicide.

His money running out, Dunne fled to the seclusion of Oregon where he managed to turn his life around. Drawing on people and events from his past, he began his second career as a novelist and essayist. Dunne’s experiences are certainly not representative of most folks’ lives, but for those who love the behind-the-scenes stories, The Way We Lived Then would make an excellent selection.

A good memoir can be written about a series of interesting events, but the best memoirs have a unifying theme. Betty Fussell, food writer and food history expert, has written a unique memoir about her life in food and war. Reading My Kitchen Wars is as enjoyable as watching a gourmet cook or listening to an artist talk about her passions.

Fussell is not the first to relate food to war: The French refer to cooking utensils as batterie de cuisine, literally, the artillery of the kitchen. Fussell’s first months in the kitchen were indeed a struggle. She was no bargain of a wife and didn’t even know how to cook spaghetti. Her journey from simple macaroni and cheese to the awesomely elaborate menus of her dinner parties will impress and inspire. By the time women are taking off their symbolic aprons and leaving the kitchen, Fussell doesn’t want to, and you applaud her, because you know it’s a conscious choice. It’s fascinating to see how much things have changed since Fussell was a young woman. She describes her personal experience in terms of the general social trends of each decade, relating especially interesting and outdated tidbits, like Julia Child’s recommendation for an asbestos sheet in the oven, or the fact that men haven’t always been tending the barbecue.

My Kitchen Wars is also about the separation of men and women. The first real wall Fussell sees between them is war, which marks the men with an experience the women cannot know. They are divided once again and forever by domestic duty.