Reading Mary F. Pols’ Accidentally on Purpose is not unlike watching the recent movie Knocked Up: career woman has one-night stand with younger man she met in bar, gets pregnant, decides to keep baby, and bemoans the father’s flaws while downplaying her role in the decision to forgo a condom. The plots differ (for example, the fictional parents end up together), and of course, only the former is a true story – a well-written, emotionally honest memoir of Pols’ journey to motherhood and increased maturity.

After her fling with 29-year-old Matt, Pols is optimistic: “I never once gave any thought to pregnancy. I was a 39-year-old woman. What chance did I have of still having an eager, ready egg on the one night in 11 months that I’d had sex?” Once the surprise and chagrin has passed, Pols discovers that, while Matt may not meet her standards in many ways, he is supportive and looks forward to being a father.

She also takes a hard look at herself – her penchant for men who don’t want her, her role as the youngest in a large family, her uncertainty about the next step in her career (after many years as a film critic for Bay Area newspapers). She details with wit and humor her efforts to juggle her many challenges, whether chronicling her attempts to get a visiting cousin to take care of her or detailing her ill-fated efforts to bring baby Dolan to a film screening.

The author’s musings about losing her parents and becoming one in the space of a year are touching. So, too, is her realization that giving other people leeway helps her be kinder to herself. Pols mentions movies here and there, including Knocked Up. She notes that the movie was similar to her and Matt’s experience in many ways, “but one part of [our] story, the part where I am at war with the circumstances that brought me my son, is over.” It’s a fitting ending for an engaging memoir: life isn’t Hollywood-perfect, but it’s pretty wonderful – and Pols seems genuinely happy with that.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

Whether you recognize him as Captain Kirk of “Star Trek,” Denny Crane from “Boston Legal” or that Priceline guy, chances are you’ve encountered William Shatner at some point during his 60-year career. In Up Till Now, a memoir that moves at the same frenetic pace as Shatner himself, the actor zooms through his childhood in Montreal, his training as a Shakespearean actor and his early days on television. Shatner has written about “Star Trek” before and doesn’t dwell on it here, though there should be enough tidbits to interest Trekkies. With this wacky, self-deprecating and decidedly unique account of his life, Shatner goes where no author has gone before.

Forty-five years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Ted Sorensen’s adoration of his old boss shines as brightly in Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History as it did when the two men were laying the foundation for what came to be known as “The New Frontier.” Kennedy hired Sorensen as his legislative assistant in 1953 shortly after being elected to the Senate and kept him on at increasing levels of responsibility throughout his presidency.

It was a strange pairing from the start. Kennedy was a Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated, Catholic war hero with fairly conservative leanings, while Sorensen was a politically progressive Nebraska native of Danish and Russian Jewish origin, a Unitarian and a registered conscientious objector. Still, they hit it off immediately. Sorensen found in Kennedy the makings of an idealist, someone who had the industry, intelligence, good will and charisma to fulfill Sorensen’s own liberal political values. Both had a rich sense of humor.

While conceding that Kennedy was unfaithful in his marriage, Sorensen does little more than nod toward that subject. In his eyes, Kennedy’s weaknesses were trivial compared to the good he achieved as president in furthering civil rights, orchestrating the removal of Russian missiles from Cuba without going to war, lobbying for nuclear disarmament and putting America on the road to pre-eminence in space exploration. He dutifully notes his superior’s flaws, such as failing to censure Joseph McCarthy and being a latecomer to the civil rights cause, but he clearly considers these as aberrations in an otherwise noble personality.

A year after joining Kennedy’s staff, Sorensen began writing speeches for him and remained his chief scribe from that point on. Without discounting his own considerable input, he does deny the still pervasive rumor that he wrote Kennedy’s best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage. He credits the senator with conceiving the idea, masterminding the research and doing much of the writing and editing. Profiles was such a success that instead of assigning Sorensen half of its income, as he had done for articles his assistant had ghosted in his name, Kennedy paid him a large flat fee, the amount of which the usually candid author chooses not to disclose.

Sorensen’s descriptions of his companionship with Kennedy, both in his office and on the interminable campaign tours, are charming glimpses into the ways politics used to be done – before the proliferation of pollsters, media advisors, opposition researchers and frenzied fundraising schemes. (Kennedy, of course, was amply funded by his father.) Always at his boss’ elbow – a factor, he admits, that hastened the breakup of his first marriage – Sorensen explains the various strategies that ultimately calmed the electorate’s fear of Kennedy’s Catholicism. It boiled down to the youthful-looking senator convincing voters that he truly believed in the separation of church and state. Sorensen observes that all the fears of religious dominance conservative Protestants then voiced against Kennedy have now been fulfilled by a Protestant president.

Counselor is one of the most readable political memoirs one could hope for. While not as breezy and gossipy as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Journals, it does convey the intensity, excitement and joy of those who believe that government, properly inspired and executed, can be a great force for good.

Edward Morris watches politics from Nashville.

Given the recent run of memoirs whose astonishing exploits and lurid tales ended up being false, it’s not surprising journalist David Carr takes extraordinary steps to ensure the credibility of his own shocking new work, The Night of the Gun. The book vividly details the New York Times media and business columnist’s descent into drug addiction and the battle to recover from both that sickness and cancer. It also documents his fight to gain custody of his children, and his subsequent struggles as a parent.

Carr videotaped more than 60 interviews, and used both legal and medical records while employing a writing style that is far more essay/documentary than literary. He’s not trying to wow or shock but rather to inform and warn, yet he injects enough humor and irony into his tale to keep the account from becoming overly detached. He also includes numerous ugly, unflattering revelations.

One example is the night a longtime friend finally pulls a gun on Carr, insisting he leave or get shot. In another section, Carr discusses his attempt to become a cocaine dealer. Both these segments and others show Carr hasn’t sanitized his account, that he truly wants readers to understand how bad his life was during this period of more than three years.

But Carr’s story doesn’t neatly end: though he overcame his dependence on crack, he eventually had problems with alcohol. Nearly 14 years later, he was arrested twice more, and even spent a night in jail wearing a tuxedo, a bizarre situation that only compounded his anger and guilt over being in trouble once again. Carr finally understands that despite his love for his family, he’s capable of slipping at any time – that knowledge accompanies everything he’ll do the rest of his life.

The Night of the Gun brilliantly blends commentary, reflection, reporting, philosophy and outrage. It’s among the most incisive, amazing and poignant memoirs you’ll encounter, even if, as Carr himself says, you can’t be certain every single word is true.

Ron Wynn writes for Nashville City Paper and other publications.

Julia Reed’s The House on First Street is distinguished by its elegance and wittiness, as well as its poignancy and civic-mindedness. Told by a 40-something woman of privilege, one who could afford a TV-watching companion for her cat while Reed led a split existence between the Big Apple and the Big Easy, she is ultimately a woman without any true home until she moves permanently to New Orleans and finds, first, true love, and then, the city of her heart in ruins.

Reed, a contributing editor to both Newsweek and Vogue, was born in what was the wealthiest, most urbane city in the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, also the native ground of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, was, like its larger, more sophisticated sister to the south, nearly destroyed by the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Thus it’s in keeping that a beautiful but decaying New Orleans house owned by another Percy becomes home to Reed and her new husband just weeks before Katrina hits.

The house remains a wreck, though largely unscathed by Katrina, and the horrors of home renovation – and the devastation wreaked elsewhere in the city – are almost a match for Reed’s descriptions of the glorious, spiritual delights of food. She chronicles with obvious glee the progressively better meals she manages to offer an entire contingent of Oklahoma National Guardsmen stationed down the block to fend off looters at a time when almost no city stores are open and no city, state, local or federal officials are to be seen.

Despite Reed’s self-deprecating generosity, also seen in her loving commitment to both new and lifelong friends, to neighbors, to various people who have worked for her, and to an improbably sweet-natured crackhead she tries again and again to redeem, Reed ensures that we do not mistake her for Mother Teresa. The tantrums she throws at contractors attract neighbors and passing cars; she lapses into what she later concedes is a “Marie Antoinette moment” while she cleans out the rotted contents of her (predictably) stuffed refrigerator after 12 electricity-free days; and her scorn for then-Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and Nagin practically curls the pages.

Some readers will be tempted to condemn The House on First Street as trivial or paternalistic in comparison to Montana-Leblanc’s book. But Reed marries, and finds her place in New Orleans, to earn what Montana-Leblanc possesses at the beginning and end of her tale: a family and roots too deep for any hurricane to destroy, despite the anger and tears and grievous loss wrought by our country’s greatest naturaldisaster.

Diann Blakely’s third poetry collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, to be published this fall by Elixir Press, takes its title from a work set in New Orleans.

The title of Phyllis Montana-Leblanc’s Not Just the Levees Broke is derived from Spike Lee’s documentary about Katrina. A poem Montana-Leblanc had written the night before Lee paid her a final visit in her FEMA trailer gave him the ending to his work; and he, in turn, was the impetus for her book. Though her language is, for the most part, plain and repertorial (and at times appropriately profane), we see Montana-Leblanc’s lyric gifts in the first pages’ description of Katrina’s clouds, “dark gray, light gray, white, and almost black. . . . They’re all separated, as if they know once they connect all hell will break loose.” Montana-Leblanc’s nightmarish tale fulfills the prophecy in those clouds.

The evacuation order comes too late from Mayor Ray Nagin. One by one, the floors of the apartment complex where Montana-Leblanc, her husband and other members of her family have taken shelter are torn off by the wind. Debris flies outside, projectiles of death. Her family is split up, first by the storm, then by officials. For eight days, Montana-Leblanc and her husband trudge, nearly sleepless, soaked in foul water and mostly without food, from dry spot to dry spot, waiting in line after line after line, until they are airlifted to San Antonio. The racism that was all too evident on big-screen TV – one of LeBlanc’s chapter headings recalls the prevention of the Red Cross from entering the state while military forces were marshaled, officials fearing rioting blacks more than being concerned with helping people – is microcosmically revealed when she realizes that Cheetos are being given only to white people in one feeding station.

Montana-Leblanc’s story may not be the best-written account of Hurricane Katrina, but it is surely among the most harrowing and enraging.

Diann Blakely’s third poetry collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, to be published this fall by Elixir Press, takes its title from a work set in New Orleans.

How is it that despite an international outcry, the displacement of nearly two million people and the murder of upwards of half a million more continues to this day in Darfur? “[E]ven though some people think Darfur is simple genocide,” Daoud Hari writes in his remarkable memoir, The Translator, “it is important to know that it is not. It is a complicated genocide.” Readers will get some sense of the political and psychological complexity of this genocide in Hari’s vivid account of the harrowing 40 days during 2006 when he, American journalist Paul Salopek and their driver, Ali, were arrested, tortured and accused of being spies, first by rebel gunman of Hari’s own tribe, then by a mad regional commander inspired by the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and finally by the military governor representing the government of Sudan.

But Hari’s stirring memoir is not meant to be a geopolitical analysis of the conflict raging through the western region of Sudan. Rather it is a personal, surprisingly engaging story of his own experiences growing up in Darfur as the youngest son in a family of herders and shepherds. Their centuries-old way of life was shattered in 2003 when members of his Zaghawa people rose up against repression by the Sudanese government, which used the occasion to launch a systematic effort to depopulate the Darfur region.

Hari, who developed a passion for English novels in high school, became a translator for a commission investigating genocide in Darfur and later for American reporters. Released, finally, from prison in Sudan, Hari continues to advocate for the people of Darfur with a sweetness and humanity that is vastly more compelling than the Sudan government’s argument of bullets and bombs.