After his junior year at Harvard College in the 1930s, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. had a summer job in the Charlestown Prison where his assignment was to prepare case histories for prisoners about to appear before the parole board. We wrote our case histories out of court records, social workers' reports and prison interviews and assessments, he recalls. It was good training for an embryonic historian. We were understaffed and had to work hard to keep up with the flow. At the time, he noted, I rather like this sense of several balls in the air at once. Those words could well apply to the whole of Schlesinger's extraordinary life and career. He has been a major American historian, a public intellectual, a political activist, a special assistant to President Kennedy and, at all times, an elegant and insightful writer. Among many honors, he has received two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Age of Jackson in 1946 and for A Thousand Days in 1966.

Schlesinger had not planned to write a memoir, but, he says, I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people. He is aware of the potential hazards of such a project, and says, In the end, no one can really know oneself or anyone else either. Fortunately for all of us, he overcame his doubts and the result, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, is a rich, evocative and perceptive look at a man and his times. Schlesinger comments that as a historian I am tempted to widen the focus and interweave the life with the times in some reasonable, melodious and candid balance. He succeeds admirably.

From a happy early childhood in the Midwest, his family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Arthur was seven years old. Not surprisingly, Of all childhood pastimes, reading was my passion. Schlesinger takes time to discuss his reading in some detail, to recall the profound excitement, the abiding fulfillment, books provided. At Harvard, he took classes with such respected scholars as Perry Miller, best known for his work on the Puritans, and D.O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance study of 19th century American authors was highly regarded. A third strong influence was Bernard DeVoto, whose composition class vastly improved Schlesinger's writing style.

Although Schlesinger's interest in reading did not decline, he did develop a singular intensity for the movies of the '30s. He says that Film . . . is not only the distinctive art of the twentieth century, it is the American art the only art to which the United States has made a major difference. Although the '30s did not produce the best films, it was a decade in which film had a vital connection with the American psyche more, I think, than it ever had before; more certainly than it has had since. Scheslinger writes of the political battles of the '30s that shaped his political outlook and how he remains to this day a New Dealer, unreconstructed and unrepentant. He points out that it was FDR's ironical achievement to rescue capitalism from the capitalists. The author devotes considerable attention to the three books he wrote during the years covered in this memoir. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson, he attempted to tell the intellectual history of a political movement. In responding to criticism that the work was an attempt to legitimize the New Deal by finding precursors in the American past, Schlesinger says, I did not, I believed (and believe), impose an artificial schema on history. My belief was (and is) that I merely discerned patterns others had overlooked. This superb memoir provides a unique window from which to view some of the important issues and influential personalities of the first half of the last century.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

In his new memoir, The Coalwood Way, Homer Hickam takes us on a nostalgic journey through the coal mines of small-town America in the 1950s. Birthed in coal dust and back-breaking labor, the people of "the Coalwood way are driven by a personal work ethic and patriotic responsibility that eludes many 21st century Americans. The residents of Coalwood and towns like it believed that without the mining of coal, there would be no steel, and without steel, there would be no United States as we know it. Attach this perspective to your mind as you enter the world of Coalwood as recreated by best-selling author and former NASA engineer Homer Hickam. Building on the success of his 1998 book, Rocket Boys, which inspired the movie October Sky, Hickam has spun yet another story of heartwarming possibilities. Now in their senior year of high school, the Rocket Boys are drafted to make Coalwood's annual Christmas pageant the best ever. Hickam's story is naively original and nostalgically humorous. Take, for instance, the names of some of its characters: Cuke (named after his love for cucumbers) Snoddy, Dreama Jenkins, Arnee Bee, the Mallet family consisting of Leo, Cleo, Rodney, Seibert and Germy, Tug and Hug Yates, Basil Ogelthorpe and Mrs. Anastopoulos.

This story works because it is honestly transparent and desperately realistic. The issues are real: a second son feeling second and sometimes unforgiven; a workaholic father feeling responsible, yet inadequate; an intelligent, perceptive mother feeling isolated, yet empowered; a lonely outcast from the wrong side of town feeling desperate and determined to belong and the town which seems unable to escape its petty provincialism; and finally, the struggle of a town's identity to move into a hopeful future without uprooting its promising past. Yes, The Coalwood Way is the story of a "Rocket Boy shooting for the moon." But it is also the story of the maturation of a boy, a family and a town who learn that growing up, while hard to do, is possible when we stay together, pray together and ultimately, learn to live together. That is not a bad lesson for our world to re-learn.

Dan Francis is a writer in Nashville and the grandson of a Kentucky coal miner.

As the chief drama critic of The New York Times from 1980 to 1994, Frank Rich was so powerful that the lights on a Broadway play could be darkened overnight by his criticism. Reviled by those he scorned in his reviews, Rich reveals in Ghost Light how his passion for the theater shaped and transformed his boyhood. Rich's memoir begins in the 1950s with a depiction of life in a dreamlike era. In the early chapters, I lingered on each page just to savor the memory. It is a treat to begin reading a book that does not foretell a harrowing future.

But in time things changed. Complicated family troubles marred Rich's otherwise blissful discovery of the theater. His parents' divorce was heartbreaking and reminds us how embarrassing it was for children in the '50s to endure the stigma of a broken marriage. His mother's remarriage was traumatic for Rich as a young boy and caused him insomnia. He was able to survive his woes with a unique escape: the theater.

Early on it was clear that things theatrical captivated Rich. As a young boy, he thought his Dad's hi fi was magic and found the lyrics from musical comedies irresistible. He listened to the music hour after hour. He even created stage productions in shoeboxes.

Rich was single-minded in his desire to immerse himself in the thrill of Broadway. Most youngsters are wide-eyed at stage productions, but Rich was possessed by them, hypnotized. His family's connections with the theater helped feed his voracious lust to see any live productions near his home in Washington D.C., or on Broadway.

Readers hoping to read about Rich's adult life may be disappointed, for this memoir ends when he is just 19 years old. Perhaps part two is in the works.

Ghost Light refers to the theatre superstition that a small stage light must be left on 24/7 to prevent a ghost from invading the premises. Like that ghost light, the theater itself became a beacon in Rich's life, eventually leading to his powerful position with the Times. The book provides a fascinating window into the boyhood that propelled him toward his destiny.

Mims Cushing is a columnist and book reviewer for The Florida Times-Union.

Cyclist Lance Armstrong's win in the 1999 Tour de France was one of the most amazing comeback stories in sports history. Only the second American to win the sport's most coveted prize, Armstrong's win came after he had successfully battled testicular cancer that had metastasized into his lungs and brain.

In this compelling book, Armstrong recounts his battle for survival and the transforming effect of facing a potentially deadly illness. He paints an unflinching self-portrait, describing his fall from the persona of a cocky, world-class athlete, seemingly indestructible, to a man helplessly facing his own mortality.

Armstrong's story begins in Texas, where he grew up as an outsider in a football-crazy Dallas suburb. Raised by a determined and loving mother, who was just 17 when he was born, Armstrong never knew his biological father and rejected his stepfather's attempts to serve as a father figure. Small in stature, but possessing an incredible level of endurance and stamina, he began competing in triathlons as a teenager. Before long, he was concentrating exclusively on cycling.

Armstrong had become an international cycling champion by October, 1996, when his world fell apart. Diagnosed with testicular cancer, he learned within days that the cancer was spreading quickly.

Aided by family, friends, and supportive doctors, Armstrong explored the options available and chose a rigorous course of surgery and chemotherapy. He details in grim terms the agony and desperation he felt while undergoing treatment for cancer.

Even after the long recovery process was seemingly complete, the French media proved to be as much of an opponent as any of Armstrong's fellow Tour de France cyclists. The year before, a doping scandal had rocked the event, and French newspapers insinuated that Armstrong's recovery was a little too miraculous.

But winning the Tour de France, amazingly, wasn't the highlight of Armstrong's year. His wife Kristin gave birth to their son Luke in the fall of 1999, the closing chapter in a storybook year.

The word survivor is often used pejoratively in the world of athletics, but Lance Armstrong really is a survivor a survivor who plans to defend his Tour de France title this year, and then go for an Olympic gold medal in Sydney.

Shelton Clark is a writer in Nashville.

In 1993, Liz Tilberis could look back over a 25-year career as a fashion editor with satisfaction and more than a touch of glee. Having clambered all the way from a summer intern at British Vogue to its editor-in-chief by her 40th birthday, she had left it for the riskier but exhilarating chance to reestablish Harper's Bazaar, flagship of the Hearst publishing empire, as the fashion magazine of record. At year's end, she was tossing a Christmas party for that '90s-media A-list where fashion meets society meets celebrity: Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Isaac Mizrahi, Donna Karan, Paloma Picasso, Todd Oldham, Mick Jones, Jann Wenner, Blaine Trump, Jerome Zipkin, Liz Smith. She remembers what she wore (Lauren's plum-colored panne velvet); what she served (spinach tarts, chicken with chutney) and on what (slate and wooden trays); the flowers, the music, etc.

She remembers with such detail because on that night she stood as if above the center point of a see-saw, with her past and her future in the balance: She had just been diagnosed with third-stage ovarian cancer, possibly the result of her previous (unsuccessful) use of fertility drugs, and was scheduled for surgery the next day. Over the last few years, Tilberis has undergone long and debilitating weeks of chemotherapy, biopsies, recurrences, and remissions. She has passed through many stages of fury, fear, self-pity, and even self-delusion and come out with a sort of strength that leaves no room for shame or even obliqueness. And she is using her new-found knowledge, as well as, frankly, the cachet of her position and her friends in the glittery world of high fashion, to capture the attention of other women at risk. The name-dropping and tales of the wild old days, the galas with Princess Diana and sleepovers in the White House (yes, the Lincoln Bedroom) are a sort of sugar-coating for the very serious dose.

"I never wanted to be a poster girl for cancer," she writes in the epilogue to No Time to Die, a memoir that expands that dichotomy of success and danger by combining stories of her success, her encounters with the rich and famous, and her collision with the truculent corruption of her cells. "But cancer has become part of who I am, along with my big feet and my English accent. I am five feet seven, I have greenish eyes, I was born on September 7 (the same day as Queen Elizabeth I), and I have ovarian cancer."

So do almost 175,000 other women in the United States, and that is the reason Tilberis, who first disclosed her illness in the pages of her own magazine, has written this book. "I am determined to lie in a shallow grave," she says in one of its best passages, "no room for other unwitting victims of this miserable disease." That dealing with her illness was frightening, extraordinarily painful, and often confusing is clear but more between the lines than in them. Although Tilberis is as straightforward and unsparing of herself as possible, the tension in the sections of the book which deal with her diagnosis and treatment is in fairly sharp contrast with the gay and irresistible gleeful manner in which she recounts her years in the fashion biz. "It was really hard, because chemotherapy does such strange things to your psyche, no matter how positively you think about that fact that this will allow you to live, no matter how many times you do it even at the stage where it takes 10 minutes and you go to work it's incredibly scary. You know full well they're putting this stuff right into your heart, the shunt is connected to a tube that goes down an artery to the aorta . . . My oncologist said to me at the beginning,

Although Wendy Burden begins her darkly funny memoir, Dead End Gene Pool, by recounting the lives of her ancestors on her father’s side (she’s the great-times-four-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt), the book’s dedication makes it clear where the heart of her story really lies: “For my mother, goddamn it.”

After Burden’s father killed himself when she was six years old, her mother, Leslie, routinely packed her children off to stay with their grandparents for weekends, summers and whenever she wanted them gone. “Burdenland,” as Leslie contemptuously called it, was as outlandish (and alcohol-soaked) as one expects from the extremely rich, and Burden is especially adept at describing its various settings, from the Fifth Avenue apartment with 14 bathrooms to the private island in Florida. But when Leslie remarried, she began to take a more active role in her children’s upbringing. First in a split-level in Virginia, then in a series of cramped houses in suburban London, they endured not just her terrible cooking and lack of any real maternal compassion, but also her disappointment in them. Burden got the worst of it, constantly fending off remarks about her weight and appearance.

The narrative loses a bit of steam toward the end, when it seems the best stories have already been told. But the last chapter contains enough revelations and scandal to carry the reader through, and the epilogue supplies Burden with, if not closure, at least some measure of reconciliation—not just with her mother, but with all the ghosts of her history.