Journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus confronts his quarter-life malaise—the urban ennui of the over-privileged and over-educated standing in line for designer cupcakes—by seeking out the radical simplicity of pilgrimage. For centuries, religious pilgrims have hit the road to Canterbury or Mecca or Mount Meru seeking divine guidance; what Lewis-Kraus seeks instead is a sense of life’s purpose.

Or at least that’s what he starts out thinking. Walking across Spain on the Camino de Santiago offers Lewis-Kraus an alternative to his meaningless, but entertaining, life on the Berlin party circuit. Traveling with his friend, the writer Tom Bissell, the two spend 39 days following the yellow arrows marking their way across Spain. There are no decisions to make. Their feet blister and ache. They quarrel and make up, flirt with other pilgrims and talk endlessly, and hilariously, about their lives. The experience of walking with a sense of direction proves so life-saving that Lewis-Kraus embarks on a second, more difficult, solo pilgrimage around the 88 temples of the Japanese island of Shikoku.

The true heart of A Sense of Direction concerns Lewis-Kraus’ deepening relationship with his father, a former rabbi who came out as gay when he was 46. These pilgrimages offer Lewis-Kraus a pretext to dig into his old anger at his father’s deceptions and lies, and prompt him to seek a renewed relationship with him. A third pilgrimage, to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in the Ukraine at what one Orthodox participant calls “The Jewish Burning Man,” provides the emotionally satisfying climax to this memoir: Joined by his father and brother, Lewis-Kraus practices the art of listening and forgiveness, finding what he was perhaps looking for all along.

A Sense of Directionis a deeply intelligent, often funny memoir about finding a sense of purpose through walking in the centuries-old footsteps of religious pilgrims. But it is also a sensitive and nuanced coming-of-age memoir about fathers and sons, and about confronting the past in order to be free to move, unencumbered, into the future.

When you're down and troubled and you need a helping hand, chances are you've found comfort in the music of Carole King, the Brooklyn-born musical prodigy with the unruly mane whose 1971 Tapestry album still holds the record for spending more than six years on the Billboard charts.

In A Natural Woman, which was named for the breakthrough 1967 hit that King and husband/co-writer Gerry Goffin wrote for Aretha Franklin, the iconic singer-songwriter traces six decades of making music that changed our lives and hers.

While still in her teens, King scored her first #1 hit in 1961 with "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" More than two dozen Goffin/King pop classics followed, including "One Fine Day," "The Loco-Motion" and "Up on the Roof."

During the decade that followed, however, King's life and music would reflect a woman's changing place in the world. After producers coaxed her into singing her own songs, her work became increasingly personal with her divorce from Goffin and disorienting relocation to Los Angeles as a single mom trying to raise young daughters in the psychedelic '60s.

While Tapestry catapulted King to rock stardom, it also set up the push-and-pull between her desire to create music and her search for a simpler life far from the madding crowd that would last the rest of her life. Following the dissolution of her marriage to L.A. musician Chuck Larkey, King’s next two husbands, Rick Evers and Rick Sorensen, were towering mountain men who introduced the city girl to the physical, mental and emotional highs and lows of pioneer life in rural Idaho.

King's voice, clear and immediate throughout, turns introspective when reflecting on her years as a commuting earth mother, torn between family and career and silently enduring domestic abuse. As much as the simple life appealed to her nurturing side, once the kids were grown the sounds of the city slowly lured King from her rural exile. Chance encounters with Paul and Linda McCartney, John and Yoko Ono and musical soul mate James Taylor over the years all served to remind her that the true solace for any artist lies with the art itself.

King's timeless music earned her four Grammy Awards and induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. A Natural Woman reminds us why we learned every song by heart.

Beth Howard’s marriage to her German husband Marcus was passionate but often tumultuous. His job required long hours and frequent relocations, and over the course of six years she often felt that he didn’t pay enough attention to her own needs. During the summer of 2009, they were living apart—Marcus in Germany, where he had just been relocated once again, and Howard in Terlingua, Texas, working on a memoir about her stint as pie baker to the stars in Malibu. But when Howard suggested they make a plan to see each other during Marcus’ vacation in August, he dismissed her; he was too overwhelmed with plans and schedules at work, and didn’t want to think about making any more arrangements. Fed up, she asked for a divorce.

Marcus protested, but she held firm. That August, instead of coming to see her in Texas, Marcus flew to Portland, Oregon, the city they considered their home base, prepared to sign their divorce papers. A few hours before he was to meet with their divorce mediator, he collapsed and died of a ruptured aorta.

“Psychologists call it complicated grief,” she writes. “Complicated grief is when someone you are close to dies and leaves you with unresolved issues, unanswered questions, unfinished business. . . . Complicated grief is when you ask your husband for a divorce you don’t really want, and he dies seven hours before signing the papers.”

Devastated, Howard returned to Portland to grieve and to figure out what to do next. She turned to the most wholesome, healing activity she could imagine: baking pie. Though her initial attempts to find a job as a baker were unsuccessful, she soon met a friend of a friend who suggested that they travel around the country shooting footage for a potential TV series about pie. They started out with a trip around California, interviewing longtime pie makers, making pie with a group of eight- and nine-year-olds, revisiting the pie shop in Malibu where Howard had worked several years earlier and baking 50 pies to hand out on the streets of L.A. for National Pie Day.

The series didn’t get picked up, but the trip had given Howard enough momentum to keep her going on a new path—one that eventually brought her to Iowa, where she had grown up (and where they know a thing or two about pie), to judge the pie contest at the Iowa State Fair. On a whim, one day she visited the American Gothic House, and learned, surprisingly, that it was for rent. She moved in and, naturally, opened up a pie stand.

Howard’s journey may seem aimless at times, but through it all she is an engaging and sympathetic narrator, and the reader is drawn into her story of grief and healing. You will put down Making Piece believing, as Howard does, that “Pie is comfort. Pie builds community. Pie heals. Pie can change the world.” And if you still need further proof, just try out one of the recipes she includes at the end.

Unexpected riches—that's what you'll find if you open I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People, an unassuming memoir that takes up where Marian Cannon Schlesinger left off in her earlier volume, Snatched From Oblivion. There she recreated the world she grew up in: Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early years of the 20th century. Here she memorably resumes her story, beginning with an unfettered string of poignant, last-call impressions of China and Guatemala just before World War II changed everything.

Schlesinger, who will be 100 years old in September, writes about the Peking of a different time, recreating in amazing detail the world of 1935. ("The air rang with the sounds of bicycle bells and the calls of street hawkers, water bearers, coal sellers, and sweetmeats men. . . . One morning I stepped out the front door and ran headlong into a large Siberian camel from the Western Hills, laden with baskets of coal for the stoves.") For sheer beauty and striking observations, these chapters are the most riveting of the book.

Not long after her unforgettable Chinese adventure, she finds herself in Guatemala where the coffee beans and the people are equally fascinating as Schlesinger presents them, with long rewarding anecdotes that make them come alive. Readers may wonder how she can remember so many details after all these years, but one thing is certain: If she retrieved them from old letters or articles of the time, they are worth the excavation.

Still, these stories become a mere appetizer to the main course that follows, the account of her years in Washington in the 1960s. As a landscape artist and portrait painter, she has a life of her own, but her marriage to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., active in the highest political circles of the city, eventually leads her into a larger orbit of national events and people, including the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

A sharp eye for foolishness balances Schlesinger’s tolerant understanding of human foibles, even of the rich and powerful. The sections that touch on the Kennedys, including a whole chapter on "The Kennedy Experience," are candid and just tart enough to be more rewarding than disturbing. (Of Jackie, she writes, "I sensed in her a sardonic tongue and a sharp eye that didn't miss much." And the kidding among the Kennedys and their cohort "was not only a form of communication, but also a way of keeping people off balance and at arm's length. In other words, keeping things under control. As for conversation, it did not exist.")

The appeal of these memoirs is surprisingly immediate, though the events they record are long past. Schlesinger is an acute and likable tour guide to a fascinating time that is so far gone it's almost a different world.

A son always strives to step out of the shadow of his father. In Benjamin Busch’s case, his father, Frederick Busch, cast a very long shadow. Frederick Busch, a novelist and short story writer, published 27 books before his death in 2006. His writing is often described as lyrical and poetic, offering readers small glimpses into their souls. So for Benjamin Busch to write his own book, the memoir Dust to Dust, is a significant step out of that shadow.

Benjamin Busch is no slouch himself. He is an actor, director and a Marine officer who served two tours in Iraq. He is perhaps best known for playing Officer Anthony Colicchio on the HBO crime series “The Wire.” And there are no oedipal motives for writing the book: Busch’s father was loving, caring and indulgent. Dust to Dust, according to the author, was written as an exploration of “the themes at my center . . . impermanence and mortality . . . my need for the adventure of exploration, the confrontation with death.”

In some ways, Busch could not be more different from his father. Fresh from protesting the war in Vietnam, Frederick Busch and his wife, Judith, moved their family to a farm in central New York. His son, Benjamin, soon develops the mentality of a warrior, wandering the woods, building forts and melting crayons into bullets. Yet his parents, opposed to violence and war, prohibit him from having a toy gun. Benjamin Busch does not consciously defy his parents, but he is clearly drawn to war games. He vividly describes his experiences playing high school football and his two tours of duty in Iraq. Yet while Busch is a soldier, he is also a poet. He chooses not to tell his tale in chronological order, but to center it around elemental themes, such as water, metal, bone and blood. And when he is done fighting, Busch settles on a farm in Michigan with his wife and two daughters.

Dust to Dust is a thoughtful meditation on life, death and family. Benjamin Busch, while still a young man, skillfully examines the passions and desires of his life, his need to explore and create some distance from his famous father, and in the end, the striking similarities he shares with the man who gave him life.

To hug him or to slug him? That is the question one ponders while reading Moshe Kasher’s gut-wrenching account of his youth, during which he was both emotionally fragile and socially insufferable. Although he’s now a high-profile standup comic, Kasher offers precious little to laugh about here, only the blackest of humor. Still, his book is compelling for its grim candor and voluminous details about slacker street life in Oakland, California. There’s even a wisp of inspiration.

Unlike the solitary and largely sympathetic character of Holden Caulfield conjured up by the book’s title, Kasher in the Rye, Kasher more resembles a gang-oriented Tom Sawyer on drugs. Born in Queens, New York, of two deaf parents who separated within months of his birth, he says he was a “feral kid” from the start, “wild at heart and physically unable to handle the energy and ferocity of [his] own body.” Leaving her abusive husband behind in New York, Kasher’s mother fled with him and his older brother to her home territory of Oakland. Kasher was seven before he was allowed to visit his father again.

Given the parental clashes, his mother’s embarrassing (to him) infirmity, the family’s poverty and his brother’s tendency to excel at school and do everything right, it’s no wonder that Kasher found himself consigned to a therapist when he was four years old. He would remain in therapy on and off—and generally without success—throughout his teenage years. Not surprisingly, he was an abysmal and rebellious student who bounced from one school to another. Nor did he find relief in visiting his father in New York. There he was immersed in a rule-ridden, orthodox Jewish enclave that warred with the free spirit he was developing on the streets of Oakland.

It’s chilling to watch Kasher narrowly evade disaster as he drinks, drugs, steals, schemes and fights his way through life. And it’s infuriating to see him break his devoted mother’s heart again and again. But there is warmth, too, in roaming with the ragtag community of loyal losers he surrounds himself with. Just when it appears that things can’t get any more depraved and desolate for him, Kasher finally seizes control of his fate, and one can almost hear the orchestra swelling. By this time, it’s welcome music indeed.

“Your voice is the wildest thing you own,” Brooke Williams tells his wife, author Terry Tempest Williams. In her latest collection, When Women Were Birds, Williams considers the development of this wild voice through a series of 54 short essays.

The book is contemplative, meditative and profound. We journey with Williams and we are not always quite sure where we are going. At the heart of our journey is an enigma: When Williams’ mother died, she left her journals to her daughter. But when Williams began looking through them, she discovered all of them were blank.

The blank journals become, in Williams’ creative hands, a vast canvas for exploring her mother’s voice, and her own voice—and beyond this, the voices of all women. It sounds like a tall order, and it is. But, as you move through the graceful prose, you will find yourself underlining key phrases. Poetic and powerful, these phrases help unlock a topic that is as hard to explain as a blank journal.

To engage such a philosophical theme, Williams’ short essays balance abstract musings with specific scenes. We go on bird-watching trips with her grandmother Mimi. We run into a poet in a copy shop in the middle of the night. We read letters from Williams’ mother. Meanwhile, Williams engages the ideas of artists, activists and writers, on topics as varied as the use of white space, conservation and reproductive rights, to uncover truths that are deeply felt but rarely stated. This is a book that only Terry Tempest Williams could write.

Raised Mormon and half in love with the land she lives on, Williams’ book almost smells like Utah. The dry air and bright sunshine are palpable. Wilderness, in the text, is a metaphor for both the land she loves and her very voice as a woman. Both are untamable. Both are creative. Both are threatened.

If you haven’t read anything by Williams, When Women Were Birds is likely a good place to begin. She has taken an enigmatic inheritance and transformed it into a beautiful meditation that (far from remaining silent) speaks loud and clear.