How’s this for an opener?

“My godfather investigated my father for the FBI and had a scar on the palm of his left hand from a machine-gun bullet shot by Baby Face Nelson. My uncle had ‘Frederick Engels’ for first and middle names. My father went to Mexico and spied on Trotsky for the Communist Party of the United States.”

If you don’t find this introduction to Daniel Menaker’s memoir a spur to keep reading, then the rest of the book holds nothing for you. But those of us possessed of a normal curiosity have by this point already embarked on a wild ride that will provide insider glimpses of the New York publishing world from 1969 onward, with the author serving as one of the scene’s principal participants and sharpest observers.

Menaker first acquaints us with his colorful family and the luminaries who come within its orbit. His mother is an editor at Fortune, where she crosses paths with such talents as John Kenneth Galbraith, Walker Evans and Dwight Macdonald. As a son of ardent leftists, Menaker dutifully attends the fabled Little Red School House in Greenwich Village. He goes on to earn degrees at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins, teach English at two ritzy private schools and take a job as a fact-checker for the New Yorker.

His tenure at the magazine, bumpy at first, lasts for 26 years, during which time he serves at the pleasure (and occasionally the displeasure) of editors William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. His description of the microscopic attention devoted to each article the magazine publishes is enough to make a run-of-the-mill copy editor weep.

Never quite at ease after Brown takes the helm of the New Yorker, Menaker accepts the offer of an editorship at Random House, where one of the first books he publishes is the blockbuster political novel Primary Colors. Later, as editor-in-chief, he offers TV’s Diane Sawyer $5 million to write a book. She declines. And so it goes.

While the glittery gossip is fun to read, the book’s most moving passages deal with the death of Menaker’s beloved older brother and his own struggles with lung cancer. Not easy to pigeonhole, this is an amalgam of autobiography and cultural history at its best.

A meditation on love and grief, on soaring in hot air balloons and crashing into the Earth, Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life is a memoir occasioned by the death of his wife. But unlike the recent memoirs by Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates on the experience of their own bereavements, Barnes waited five years to craft this book, which is marked by a sense of perspective on the tragedy of loss.

Beautifully reticent with personal detail, Levels of Life opens from the outlook of a Victorian hot air balloon. The stories of three pioneering aeronauts—Fred Burnaby, Sarah Bernhardt and Félix Tournachon—offer a literally distanced view of humanity. These aeronauts were among the first people to look down at the Earth from the airy freedom of the sky. But that freedom comes at the cost of the inherent dangers of crashing and burning.

Which brings us to the love stories of the aeronauts. Burnaby loved Bernhardt, declared his love, and was wounded by her rejection. Tournachon was uxorious (an important word for Barnes): in love with his wife for the 55 years of their marriage until the day she died. We aspire to love like we aspire to the heights, but “every love story is a potential grief story,” says Barnes.

The memoir’s third section takes us to Barnes’ own grief story, when 30 years of love are ripped away in an instant by brain cancer. There were only 37 days, Barnes tells us, from his wife’s diagnosis to her death, and the loss forever of her “radiant curiosity.” This is about the only personal detail Barnes tells us, preferring to muse instead upon bigger questions: love, grief, anger, mourning and loneliness—“just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.”

Levels of Life tells a universal story, a patterning of human existence best seen from the air. Julian Barnes is at his best in this subtle and intelligent memoir, even as it narrates the worst.

David Schickler’s memoir, The Dark Path, is about a lifelong balancing act between God and sex. Does one cancel out the other? It opens with 10-year-old David staring at a pretty girl at Mass, a scene that emblematizes his twin obsessions. Religion comes naturally to David, who as a child is drawn to the quiet suburban woods behind his house, and to a dark path through the trees where he talks to God. But more earthly forms of love appeal just as much, as the young David charmingly inquires of each new crush, “Are you my wife?” (Luckily, not out loud.)

What begins as a cute story of boyish tension soon deepens into actual conflict. Witnessing the casual cruelty of teenage sex sends David careening toward the Church, especially during his college years at Georgetown. But the Jesuit brotherhood contains its own hypocrisies, and David is left stranded with neither God nor girlfriend to sustain him. The scenes depicting how his spiritual crisis leads to physical and mental collapse are searing and honest. We witness a loving heart laid waste by the collapse of its belief system.

Although this may sound grim, Schickler’s deft hand with dialogue, scene and humor maintains a light touch, and provides an interesting contrast to the dark night of the soul he undergoes. You can sense his screenwriter’s eye in the scenes set at the boarding school in Vermont where he goes to teach and has a nervous breakdown—his depiction of his students responding to him crying in class is priceless.

So this is a comic memoir, and yet its great strength is the simplicity and gentleness of the heart under examination. The balancing act between God and sex is mirrored by the equilibrium the book maintains between humor and despair. With The Dark Path, Schickler has written a spiritual memoir about love as the common denominator between religious and earthly passions.

Like most children, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák was vaguely familiar with her parents’ background as she was growing up, but didn’t know or understand many details. As in many immigrant homes, the adults discussed those details in what American-born Marianne regarded as “secret” languages—in her family’s case, mostly in Hungarian.

After her parents and other beloved older relatives died, Szegedy-Maszák decided to delve more deeply into the unknowns, aided by a cache of letters from her father to her mother during their difficult courtship. And what a rich story she tells in I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Aladár and Hanna Szegedy-Maszák and their families were people of extraordinary sophistication and stamina who survived persecution by both Nazis and Communists.

Hanna was a member of a hugely wealthy clan descended from pioneering Jewish industrialist Manfred Weiss, the Andrew Carnegie of Hungary. Most of the family converted to Christianity, but that didn’t help them with the Nazis and their vicious Hungarian allies. They survived, but in a way that aroused great resentment among fellow Hungarians: A Himmler aide forced them to sign over their fortune to the Nazis in exchange for being allowed to escape. Unwelcome in Hungary after the war, most went to the U.S., where they again thrived.

Aladár was a Christian, a highly regarded diplomat, who resisted Hungary’s alliance with Germany and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. When the Germans invaded, he was sent to Dachau. After liberation, he rose from concentration camp prisoner to Hungarian ambassador to the U.S. in an astonishingly short time. Then came the Communist coup in Hungary. Aladár tried mightily to persuade the U.S. to intervene, failed again, and spent the rest of his life in exile.

Their daughter tells their stories with beautiful sensitivity. She is loving but clear-eyed about their flaws and troubles. Her parents lived in middle-class comfort in Washington, D.C., but her father in particular was broken by his political and personal tragedies. Marianne grew up in a household darkened by his depression. Yet through it all, his deep love for his wife endured. Their daughter’s fine memoir highlights a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust and honors their memory.

“We’re just looking for the ghost town,” a stranger tells Justin St. Germain on the back roads of Arizona. St. Germain understands—maybe more than the stranger could appreciate. He is a haunted man. After his mother’s death, he moved from Arizona to San Francisco and rarely told new friends that she had been murdered when he was 19. He didn’t want to be defined by the tragedy. But now he can’t forget it, and Son of a Gun is his journey to make sense of it all.

The journey is also literal, as St. Germain returns to the scene of the crime. He interviews the detective, pages through old case files and reconnects with his mother’s former boyfriends. There’s something about the memoir that’s reminiscent of a dog sniffing around a backyard, determined and focused, following pure animal instinct to dig things up. Ultimately St. Germain’s journey is as much about himself as it is about his mother. It is about understanding how he arrived at his “new and clean” life in California after leaving behind such wreckage—not just the murder, but also emotional wreckage, domestic violence and poverty.

The book’s construction is pure elegance. By weaving the history of Wyatt Earp with his own story, St. Germain suggests meaningful parallels between the town of Tombstone and himself. Tombstone is defined by 30 seconds of violence that happened more than 100 years ago. St. Germain, too, is struggling against the inevitability of the past defining his present. As all of this unfolds, St. Germain manages to make the book feel like an old Western, a burlesque of violence strangely appropriate for his tale. By page 15 I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. Emotionally raw and beautifully written, Son of a Gun is a book you won’t soon forget.