Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother’s Story is the autobiography of Diki Tsering, mother of the 14th Dalai Lama. She recently died in Darjeeling, India, where she had lived in exile with her family and the Dalai Lama. Being published at the same time is Transforming the Mind, by the Dalai Lama himself, (Thorsons, $20, 0722540302) which attempts to demonstrate ways of transforming difficult life situations into opportunities for spiritual growth. The two books use different methods to demonstrate the same theme: refinement through perseverance.

Dalai Lama, My Son tells how Diki Tsering lived through the drastic transformation from a hard-working farm girl on the high Tibetan plains to an esteemed political figure at the center of an international debate. She reveals life at the heart of Tibet’s difficult relationship with communist China, the persecution of the Tibetan people, and her family’s sorrowful flight to India in 1959. Diki Tsering explains her difficult transitions not as trials to overcome, but as inevitable and cleansing paths to follow.

I was named Sonam Tsomo. My birth name belongs to another life. Most people know me as Diki Tsering.

Ever since I went to live in Lhasa, I tried to become Diki Tsering, with all the social forms and graces that go with that name. Adventure lurks at every turn. Even in the calmly relayed chapters that describe everyday farm life, the reader will learn how women give birth in the stable, alone, and how terrifying superstitions about ghosts explain deaths from disease or malnutrition. The story transforms in the second half of the book from cultural history lesson to exciting fairy tale adventure. Diki Tsering’s son, known from birth as Lhomo Dhondup, undergoes strange trials leading to his new identity as a reincarnation of the Buddha. The family travels on a dangerous three-month journey from their farm to Lhasa, where Lhomo Dhondup will be received as Tibet’s revered leader, the Dalai Lama. Communist Chinese lurk everywhere, and disguise is the only hope of the persecuted. Unfortunately, this exotic fairy tale is reality, and the Dalai Lama continues to teach about compassion as an exiled man.

Amy Ryce is a writer in Nashville.

The scariest word in the English language excluding IRS has to be cancer. And what if you heard doctors say cancer to you, not once, but three different times regarding three different illnesses? Hamilton Jordan, former campaign manager and chief of staff for President Jimmy Carter, was diagnosed on three different occasions with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer. He had been given a 25 percent chance of survival, but claims that by taking control of his own treatment, he raised his projected odds to more than 50 percent. That was almost 15 years ago. How people react emotionally, intellectually, and physically to the simple words

Life sometimes throws a curve ball.

In some instances, you are forced to grow up before it’s time. Dani Shapiro experiences both during one fateful year. At 23, she doesn’t recognize herself anymore. She has become the mistress of a wealthy businessman who treats her to indulgences at spas and expensive shops. She has also fallen victim to the world of drugs in order to escape from a pain rooted in her Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

Then, the call comes. Her parents have been in a terrible accident on the snowy roads near her family home. Both are hospitalized, and Shapiro has no time to waste. As she treks through an emotional journey into the past, she discovers that she has lost control of her life. Upon arrival at the hospital, Shapiro sees her mother in white bandages, a full body cast, legs in traction with 80 fractures in her body; she stares in fear at what her mother has become. She finds her father in a coma from which, doctors say, he may never emerge. A miracle occurs, however, and he does come out of the coma only to die weeks later.

The fact that Shapiro lost the road map to her life becomes clear after her father’s death. As she looks through drawers containing her past receipts, letters from her agent, a photo of herself she wonders what went wrong.

She considers what her life is now: unopened bills, undeposited residual checks, angry letters from her married lover, tiny jars of cocaine and an expired credit card she uses to chop up it up. Peppered with Jewish words, the reader sees Shapiro slipping back to the world in which she grew up. As her mother stays in the hospital and begins to recover, Shapiro, too, opts to get her life in order. She attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, though still in denial about her problem. While she tells herself she can quit, Shapiro hears her father’s voice louder in death than it was in life. She knows she cannot look back. In her all of her pain, Shapiro teaches the reader to re-center and go ahead. Success, love, and life’s goodness will come with hard work and self-transformation and usually after tragedy has struck on every level. Shapiro, who has written three novels, may have written her best book yet with Slow Motion, an honest and compelling story of life’s thread being sewn back together.

Suzi Parker is a freelance writer in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The more I sifted through his life and mine, the more I tried to bring my father to myself, the more I recognized that what I was looking for lay somewhere between truth and imagination. Long before Deliverance, my father had begun to make himself up. And me. He would not tolerate for a minute the world as it was.

Christopher Dickey And you thought your family was dysfunctional. Journalist and sometime filmmaker Christopher Dickey had a problem: a living legend of poet-novelist father who, by force of personality and intellect, exerted a massive influence on everyone in his life. And when, with the publication of Deliverance, James Dickey’s celebrity exploded, the shrapnel helped send his wife to an alcoholic grave and his sons into desperate flight. How to communicate with a man who has devolved into besotted self-caricature? How much paternal drinkin’, cussin’, whorin’, and adventure can one exquisitely sensitive young man take? And how much brilliance? Dickey’s faith in his creative powers made him a great poet and, often, a wonderful father. It also permitted him to vanish into the stratosphere of vanity and self-indulgence.

Two decades after Deliverance the book and film, comes deliverance the family restoration. As Jim Dickey’s alcoholism and god-complex have spiraled out of control, he has become a broken old man. A second marriage has collapsed into violence and a teenage daughter is put at risk by the poison enveloping the family home. The crisis calls the author back to his father and young half-sister and sets the stage for the reconciliation and healing at the core of this lovely book.

Admirers of the elder Dickey’s work will, of course, be enthralled by the biography. By turns lyrical and visceral, the book’s language brings us to a vivid, even unnerving, intimacy with Jim Dickey as father, husband, and poet. As memoir, the author’s candor and unflinching self-scrutiny lend the book an added weight; Chris Dickey is just as willing to lay bare his own faults and failings as anyone else’s. Finally, the younger Dickey’s journalistic background gives Summer of Deliverance its unique edge. The sensibility of an observer-chronicler contrasts beautifully with Jim Dickey’s credo of artistic daring and self-invention. In his waning days, the father who sought not to reflect but to create worlds with his verse begs the son to remember him just as he was to make history of myth. The book has become between them a search for the truth of their family’s history, of the passage of their lives together and apart. Not the stuff of Jim Dickey’s primal dramas but rendered with an intensity and precision no less remarkable. The younger Dickey’s struggle not merely to tolerate but to embrace and forgive to know his father, invests the book with an urgency and power well beyond that of finely wrought reminiscence. More than the biography of a celebrated literary figure, it is a delicate examination of creativity and of the power of familial bonds a peacemaking with the joys and sorrows of their world as it was.

Christopher Lawrence is a writer-researcher at Vanity Fair in New York City.

Michael Korda has been at the heart of the book business both as an editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster and as a best-selling author. For over 40 years he has been on the inside of American publishing, from the time when it was perceived as a gentleman’s occupation through the show-business-driven ’90s, from the time when editors were the premier decision-makers to today’s accountant-dominated industry. Max Schuster once told Korda, This is commerce, you see, as well as culture.

Although Another Life is written as a memoir, Korda’s emphasis is on the people he’s worked with over the years. Presidents and royalty, great writers and unknowns have all benefited from Korda’s editing. And we benefit by Korda having such a good memory and a talent for storytelling. From the ’60s to the ’90s, Korda documents the publishing approach to creating bestsellers, finally concluding, "The celebrity autobiography was well suited to the growing symbiosis between books and television. Give the reader a break, was Dick Simon’s dictate to every editor at Simon and Schuster."

Korda applied this wisdom to the books he edited, but also to this book he’s written for us now. The stories flow. He drops celebrity, publishing, and writers’ names as we would those in our own office, for his office really did see all those noted people. His anecdotes convey both the positive and the less-than-sterling behavior of those he worked with. He also offers lots of book trivia, including the tidbit that Catch-22 was originally titled "Catch-18," until it was discovered that the new novel from Leon Uris was called Mila-18.

This is a fun and fascinating look into the business that generates all those books we read.

George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio.

Often, volumes of correspondence are published to enlighten readers about famous figures’ private thoughts or insights expressed only through letter writing. But Dear Exile stands on the merits of the correspondence itself. Readers meet the two writers through this book, and grow to appreciate their friendship and separate experiences through the underutilized art of correspondence. Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery are college friends who began writing each other when Kate and her husband joined the Peace Corps and went to teach school in Africa while Hilary made her way in New York City. The result is an evocative and often intense work expressing two very different sides of the same close relationship.

Each writer expresses disillusionment to her friend. Hilary writes, Kate, oh, how you’ve escaped . . . I’m making a life from scratch over here. It’s no cakemix, while Kate writes of her own trouble adjusting to life in Kenya, with its hierarchical and foreign school system: I feel jittery, and, when in the house, cry easily. I think it’s because Dave and I feel so strongly that what’s going on is horrible, and everyone around us thinks it’s just fine. But each also reports on her own successes and delights. Hilary writes of her new apartment: I stood in the living room and thought, I’m going to see the light through different seasons here . . . I felt so easy, so content right then. Kate’s pleasures are quite different, but as keenly felt as she acclimates to daily life in Africa. She writes, Now and then a child running by would yell,

Among the unlikely results of a shipwreck 86 years ago is Leonardo DiCaprio’s current starring role in the daydreams of teenage females from Boise to Baghdad. DiCaprio was lucky to be aboard James Cameron’s film Titanic. By now, as everyone knows, the film can be described only in superlatives. It is the most expensive movie ever made, the highest-grossing motion picture of all time, the first film ever to gross $1 billion worldwide. Its soundtrack is surprise the best-selling ever. And it won more Oscars (11) than any film since, God help us, Ben Hur. The ship itself may have sunk for good, but its story has been resurrected, with a mixture of horror and glee, in books, documentaries, exhibitions, movies, and even a Broadway musical. And still they come. Herewith, marking the September release of Titanic on home video, a harvest of new books and booklike things. We might as well begin with another superlative the two biggest, most impressive, and most expensive books on our list. Even if you barely know the Titanic from the good ship Lollipop, you will enjoy Titanic: An Illustrated History (Hyperion, $39.95, 078686401X), by Don Lynch. Throughout, the lively text is illuminated by photos, drawings, maps, and the beautiful photorealistic paintings of Ken Marschall, who has emerged as the disaster’s visual historian. Marschall gets his own book, with text by Rick Archbold, in a fascinating survey of his three decades of work, Art of Titanic (Hyperion, $40, 0786864559). Sketches, photos, and 80-plus gorgeous paintings illuminate the complicated process of historical illustration. No photograph can match Marschall’s poignant visions of either the gaiety aboard ship or the gloomy depths of the wreckage.

Simon and Schuster is publishing Titanic: Fortune and Fate ($30, 0684857103), the companion volume to the Mariner’s Museum exhibition of the same name. Artifacts include personal mementos, letters, and other moving records of the lives lost that night in 1912, with a text emphasizing less the well-known play-by-play and more the personalities involved. There are all sorts of stories of the shipwreck, but naturally eyewitness accounts are the most impressive. One such survivor, an observant young woman named Violet Jessup, wrote her memoirs in 1934. They are published for the first time in Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessup, Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters (Sheridan House, $23.95, 1574090356). She was a steward aboard the Titanic and a wartime nurse aboard the Britannic, and her story is as compelling as any in the disaster’s lore. Surprisingly, it’s also funny.

If you worry you missed the boat and want to catch up, you might try The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Titanic (Alpha Books, $18.95, 0028627121), by Jay Stevenson and Sharon Rutman. Like others in this series (which add up to a veritable idiot’s encyclopedia), this book manages to cram an astonishing amount of information into an irresistible browser format. Robert D. Ballard, co-leader of the 1985 expedition that found the sunken ship, first published his story in 1987. Now there is a newly updated trade paperback edition, The Discovery of the Titanic: Exploring the Greatest of All Lost Ships (Warner, $13.99, 0446671746), by Robert D. Ballard. Its many illustrations include paintings and touching sea-bottom photos.

If you really want to get behind the scenes, you should turn to a paperback entitled The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation (Pocket, $7.99, 0671025538), edited by Tom Kuntz. Following its 500 or so pages of compelling (okay, somewhat compelling) transcripts you’ll find an index of witnesses and a digest of their testimony. The most original new contributions to Titaniana are not even books at all. The Titanic Collection: Mementos of the Maiden Voyage (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811820521) is a handsomely packaged collection of facsimile documents. They come in a booklike box designed to resemble a steamer trunk, complete with hinges. A tray sets inside the trunk, and both spaces are filled with extraordinary facsimiles. Items include copies of a first class passenger ticket, the menu for the fateful night, the music repertoire, telegraph flimsies, luggage labels (yes, they’re adhesive), smudged and scribbled postcards, and many other documents. The packaging on Titanic: The Official Story (Random House, $25, 0375501150) is not quite so impressive, but the facsimiles are great fun. These documents are larger, and include stateroom charts, a newspaper page, the ship’s register form, telegrams. Far more evocative than mere photos of artifacts.

As you leave the bookstore with this armload, on your way to buy the video of Cameron’s *Titanic*, rest easy in the knowledge that at least a sequel seems Michael Sims is a frequent contributor to BookPage and the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

In 1985, David Owen bought an old house in the country, fleeing the concrete cubic-foot confinement of an apartment in the Big Apple. Owen’s new home was built in 1790, a big old dilapidated house that had been a former prep-school dormitory. Casting sensibility to the winds, he and his wife purchased it on pure intuition, omitting research into its faults that surely would have persuaded them not to buy it in the first place.

Then they began renovating, slowly. He wrote a book about it, called The Walls Around Us, and if you haven’t read it yet, you’ve missed a funny and insightful book on old-house renovation, resonant with undertones of confidence fueled by the heat of burned bridges. By itself, the section on How to Find the Best Paint is worth the price of that book.

Around the House takes readers even deeper into the mystical aspects of home ownership, one salient of which is an unwritten law: those who work on their houses always wind up remodeling the space between their ears. Like an ancient house, the book has some funny rooms, with chapters like Nature’s Double Standard and Benign Neglect. Well-written humor comes as no surprise to those familiar with Owen’s previous books.

However, this one sings in the darndest places. Part of it is the astounding ease with which Owen gives you back fleeting moments of your own childhood, exploring mysterious rooms in creaky old houses. Some of it can be found in beautifully crafted epigrams, such as Owen’s Law: whatever you learn by renovating an old house is exactly what you needed to know before you started. Much of it lies in the fact that, while Owen blithely tackles gigantic projects and labors that would startle Hercules he bought his first computer in 1981, to give you an idea of his daring he relies on manly instincts of procrastination when it comes to nonessential repair. Roof leaks? Find bucket. Air infiltration? Duct tape. He is one of us.

Best of all, though, Owen leads by example, showing his readers the utter futility of working on a house with the goal of finishing it. Like most, he is neither a working fool nor a loafer, although his apathy toward yard work will endear him to every homeowner in America. His dogged quest for more storage space balances it nicely, even when he explains that the concept of enough storage space is a wholly nonexistent ideal. Pursuing lost causes is its own reward.

The essays are short but full of sweetness, philosophy, humor, hopeless optimism, cautionary tales, and practical advice on how to saw the legs of a bed when the floors slope. Around the House will make you think, especially at those critical times just before you start tinkering with your own rooftree. Read this book first, to prepare your psyche for the adventure. Like any big project, it’s a labor of love, which is always much wiser than mere logic.

Jeff Taylor is author of the book Tools of the Trade: The Art and Craft of Carpentry and the upcoming Tools of the Earth: The Practice and Pleasure of Gardening, both from Chronicle Books.

When Robert McCrum suffered a stroke at the age of 42, he joined a community of patients who endure insult to the brain and fight their way back to the lives they once took for granted. He chronicles his own battle to recover himself in My Year Off. Books and reading play a large part in McCrum’s account. As both a writer himself and editor to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje, McCrum is preoccupied by the literary, and books, reading, and writing are integral parts of his convalescence. His wife Sarah comforts him after his stroke by reading aloud from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he writes that Wordsworth, famously, spoke of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. In hospital, I experienced memory as emotion recollected in immobility. Throughout his account, McCrum often translates his experiences through literature. His wide usage of books and literary encounters constructs a widened lens through which the reader understands his episode. Writing itself is privileged through McCrum’s liberal use of his own diary as well as Sarah’s. Glimpses of their feelings as the stroke changes their lives add a measure of contemporary understanding that hindsight and editorial awareness sometimes elides. Sarah’s thoughts in particular widen the spectrum of the stroke’s impact. She writes despairingly, What I couldn’t say, though, was: I never learned to push a wheelchair that had my husband in it. . . . Why do you expect me to know what to do? but also with defiance: When people wouldn’t step aside to let [Robert] go I glared at them and made them feel bad. Her voice proclaims with authority like McCrum’s own, demonstrating the range of effect such an event has on the victim’s family as well as him or herself.

McCrum’s affinity for detail codifies his experience for his audience with humor and perspicacity. He writes: [Stroke] is like losing your wallet every day. Your wallet and your Filofax. The same sense of

Only every daughter and son alive today should read this book. The message is universal: Live long enough, and you’ll finally understand your parents.

Pick it up just on the basis of that oversimplification, however, and you’ll have wonderful surprises in store. Alix Kates Shulman (author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and nine other books, including children’s books) has written one of the most tender and insightful books yet in this era of moving, if sometimes mean, memoirs. Demonstrating her characteristic mastery of language (which she attributes to her father), she traces the history of her relationship with her parents from early dependency (hers) to rebellious independence (hers) back to dependency (theirs). At 20, she always assumed the worst about them and pursued for many years that all-American ambitious lust for freedom, which impelled her to identify her family with everything I’d renounced, even though, as she later perceives, it was in large part their upbringing that set her direction.

Only in her sixties, faced with the necessity of taking charge of her parents’ lives, does Shulman allow herself to look squarely at the facts of her relationship with them. Complicating the picture is a strain of regret about an unresolved relationship with her adopted brother who died while they were estranged. As we accompany her on this painful journey, through the most complex dimensions of past and present, of did and should, of felt and thought, of missed and learned, we share with her the fresh, yet age-old lesson of the precariousness of independence, the limits of self-reliance, and, in the end, that in the scales of fulfillment, devotion may sometimes outweigh freedom. Not that Shulman has abandoned the hard-won feminist insights that inform her earlier books. Only that she has broadened them to achieve a level of understanding and wisdom that sometimes elude more doctrinaire writers, a supportive rather than adversarial position. And finally she proves indeed to be a good enough daughter. The message here for readers is plain and simple: Call home now.

Maude McDaniel is a writer in Cumberland, Maryland.