Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) was one of the two or three most prominent and influential writer-intellectuals in post-World War II America. He was a widely published literary critic, memoirist and, much later in his life, a professor. His first book, the highly acclaimed On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, was published in 1942 when he was 27 years old. In the Preface to the 50th Anniversary Edition, an incredibly long print life for a book on literary criticism, he noted, “I wrote about American literature before it became the industry it is today. . . . The people in my book still thought, like Emerson, that they were creating American literature.” His autobiographical books were A Walker in the City, which is often regarded as a classic, Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew. His critical studies include Contemporaries, An American Procession and God and the American Writer. He moved in literary and social circles where his close friends included Hannah Arendt, Richard Hofstadter and Saul Bellow.

At the same time, beginning in the 1930s and continuing until shortly before his death, he was also engaged in keeping personal journals, which give his observations and thoughts about a wide range of private and public matters. He describes these journals as “the most exciting and influential form of my life,” his “true autobiography,” where “everything that is fundamental in me has first found its expression.” Now Yale University Press has published a representative selection from Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited and given valuable annotation by Richard Cook, whose Alfred Kazin: A Biography was published in 2007. The journals total 7,000 pages and Cook offers about one-sixth of the total.

The journals reveal a sensitive and passionate man, always aware of his upbringing as the child of uneducated Russian immigrant parents, and show him as a gifted and insightful interpreter of American literature. He writes about his often turbulent life with his first three wives and contentment with his fourth wife, Judith Dunford. We get his frequently conflicted responses to his Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. His word-portraits of, and sometimes contradictory feelings about, contemporaries such as Edmund Wilson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. are a highlight. He never forgets his roots and he is critical of those who he feels have abandoned the less fortunate in our society.

I interviewed Kazin for BookPage in 1996 when his A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin was published. In that collection, many if not all of the selections were rewritten and the reader was given only a general idea when the original entry was written. When we requested the interview we were told that because Kazin was being treated for cancer he would be able to take only seven questions. Once we got into our conversation, however, talking about his life and career and literature, he was fully engaged and enthusiastic, and our talk went on for much longer than I expected.

This extraordinary new volume takes us into the life and times of a gifted and fascinating man who was, no doubt, at times difficult to be around. His brutally honest look at himself is a rare look at an important literary figure.

Roger Bishop is a retired local bookseller and a longtime contributor to BookPage.

In her best-selling memoir, Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies discovered that her husband had left her for another woman. Devastated, she strove mightily to understand his actions when a friend told her cavalierly that such things happen every day.

In the dazzling sequel, A Year and Six Seconds, Gillies, best known for her role as Detective Stabler’s wife on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” charmingly chronicles the jagged ways that people fall out of relationships and the unexpected, and often exhilarating, ways that they fall back into love.

Following her breakup, Gillies grabs her two sons and leaves the idyllic rural life of Lorain, Ohio, and her teaching position at Oberlin College, where her husband teaches English, for her parents’ apartment in New York City, where she herself grew up. Through a series of hilarious and poignant vignettes, Gillies shares with us her mighty struggles to cope with the loss of a relationship that she thought would last forever, the attempts to balance the needs of her two young sons with her own need for love and support, and the feelings of failure and insecurity that arise when she faces her parents. She writes, “It felt like nobody wanted us, and we needed everybody.”

At the height of her struggle to make her new life, Gillies flies back to Ohio to finalize her divorce from her husband, Josiah. Her heart aches, for even though she is familiar with the abstract idea of getting divorced, the very act of getting divorced is emotionally violent. Yet when Gillies returns to New York later that day, the sun is shining, and Central Park West is full of promises and people. At this moment, of course, she starts her new life.

Shortly after her divorce, Gillies meets Peter, a single father, and falls in love in six seconds; one year after they meet, Peter proposes, and soon she embarks on the road to happiness and love. Through her struggles, Gillies admits that “everything that happens in your life, no matter if it is positive or negative, eventually makes sense. Many things are not perfect, but they are good enough, and good enough is all you really need.” Gillies’ moving memoir is sure to inspire others in their struggles to overcome adversity and find new hope through love.

Disregard the in-your-face title—Yoga Bitch is actually a hilarious, thoughtful and only occasionally profane account of one young woman facing mortality and bad habits head on.

Suzanne Morrison was 24 years old when the Twin Towers fell. Shortly thereafter, feeling stressed and spiritually disoriented, she found herself wandering into a yoga studio on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Yoga was, to say the least, not really her thing up until that point: “My idea of exercise was walking up the hill to buy smokes,” Morrison writes. “Rearranging my bookshelves. Having sex. Maybe an especially vigorous acting exercise. Most of the time I lived above the neck.”

But Morrison finds herself drawn to her yoga practice in a way she can’t quite explain. She puts her plans to move to New York City on hold so she can head to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat. Yoga Bitch is something of a travel journal, in which she records her thoughts from the moment her plane leaves Seattle to her arrival in a steamy Balinese village. “Wellness is very big among my yogamates,” she muses on Day 3. “If Wellness were a person, it would be Michael Jackson circa 1984, and my yogamates would be screaming, crying fans, jumping up and down just to be so near to it. Kind of the way I would act around a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes right about now.”

Anyone who has read her eponymous blog or seen her one-woman show knows Morrison is whip-smart and irreverent. In her first book, she proves that she’s also wise and has a singular way with words. Whether you relate to Morrison more in her cigarette-smoking, stressed-out urbanite phase or in full-on Yoga Bitch mode, this book will inspire you to walk your own path to enlightenment—or at least make you laugh a lot.

As a young man, Roald Amundsen set out with a friend on an Arctic training exercise, skiing west of Oslo to a mountain range with a plateau that extended to Bergen. While the two hoped to reach their goal in two days, a blizzard, combined with the pair’s lack of preparation for the trip, turned a training exercise into a misadventure that almost ended in tragedy. As a result of this event, Amundsen never again went unprepared into a polar environment.

In South With the Sun, her fast-paced and inspiring chronicle that is part biography and part memoir, Lynne Cox, a seasoned explorer herself who’s already shared her aquatic adventures in the breathtaking Swimming to Antarctica, feels compelled to follow Amundsen’s path. He becomes for her a waypoint along her life’s journey, providing hope, inspiration and guidance as she retraces his steps across the Northwest Passage. From her own adventures along the Amundsen trail, Cox learns that he succeeded where others had failed because he prepared extensively for his journeys and he took calculated risks. In preparation for his journey to Antarctica, for example, Amundsen learned how to sail and navigate and started to earn his skipper’s license. In addition, he learned to listen to the experts on the ship; unlike many of his fellow explorers, he avoided a devastating bout of scurvy during the Belgica expedition to Antarctica simply by following the suggestions of the ship’s physician to eat raw meat.

Cox weaves her own adventures into her narrative about Amundsen. She prepares methodically for her swims on the coast of Greenland, Baffin Island, King William Island and Cambridge Bay in water as cold as 28.8 degrees without a wet suit. As she swims the Chukchi Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, she survives her encounters with masses of jellyfish and feels elated that her swims have taken her into waters that few have ever entered—and that she has traveled through the same Arctic that Amundsen had, a place where one misstep could mean disaster.

Most parents are familiar with the figurative “landmines” of childhood: scraped knees, hurt feelings, unsuccessful playdates. But few, at least in the West, have to worry about actual ones. Landmines are but one of the hazards that Alexandra Fuller, author of the memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), had to contend with while growing up in war-torn Rhodesia in the 1970s.

With her latest memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Fuller returns to Africa and her endlessly fascinating family. In this follow-up, which easily stands alone, Fuller revisits familiar terrain, but with a vastly different perspective—that of someone a decade older who’s now a parent herself.

While her first memoir chronicled her Rhodesian childhood, this one focuses on the lives of her intrepid parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller, who resolved to make a life for themselves on their African farm despite personal heartbreak and political upheaval. At its core, however, Cocktail Hour is the story of Fuller’s dynamic mother, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she is sometimes known. Fuller recreates scenes of her mother bumping across treacherous terrain in a Land Rover, an Uzi lying across her lap, and striding across the land with an assortment of dogs in her wake. Fuller interviewed both her parents extensively for this book, especially Nicola, whose voice she has captured with remarkable precision.

Born “one million percent Highland Scottish” on the Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya during the 1950s, Nicola rode a donkey to school, where she endured harsh treatment at the hands of the nuns; became an accomplished equestrian at an early age; and married a dashing Englishman before settling down on a farm, first in Kenya, then Rhodesia, where the author and her sister Vanessa were born in the late 1960s. When a civil war broke out in the mid-1970s, Fuller’s tenacious parents decided to dig in rather than leave Africa. We follow the young Fullers as they traverse the continent, fleeing from war and unspeakable heartache, hopscotching from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia.

When the girls moved away as grownups (the author lives in Wyoming with her American husband, a river guide), their parents procured a fish and banana farm in Zambia, where they remain to this day. It is here that Fuller returns at the end of the book to sit under the legendary Tree of Forgetfulness, where, according to local lore, ancestors reside and villagers meet to resolve disputes.

Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir. She renders this portrait of her family with both humor and compassion—from Nicola and Tim’s early years, awash in that fragrant Kenyan air, to their later ones in the Zambian valley where they seem to have finally found home.

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Interview with Alexandra Fuller for Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

Sacha Scoblic lived to drink, until the morning she stumbled out of a bar with only vague memories of the night before. She gave up alcohol that day, sick of the person she had become. But without alcohol, who was she? In Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety, she discovers that sobriety has its own strange trips.

Memoirs about recovery travel a well-trodden path, but not many of them manage to be this piercing and ribald. Scoblic’s memoir uncovers the everyday frustrations recovering alcoholics face as they negotiate a world saturated with their drug of choice. It’s a hilarious, honest and heart-breaking glimpse into the routine torments of addiction.

Terribly insecure and already addicted to booze, 30-something Scoblic feels intimidated by her sophisticated new colleagues at the New Republic. “At the time, I assumed either cosmic intervention or a gas leak in the building had led to me getting hired at the New Republic magazine,” she writes. “Still, I was completely ready to emulate Hunter S. Thompson: I’d drink all night and write colorful scene-scapes about American zeitgeist by day.” She relies on drinking to transform herself into a snarky party girl willing to try anything once, even if it also makes her cruel, self-centered and prone to property damage.

But after years of hangovers, panic attacks and relationships as empty as last night’s beer bottles, Scoblic finally gives it up. She struggles to stay clean, fantasizing about wacky scenarios that would require her to drink again, such as celebrating a successful nuclear arms treaty with Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and a bottle of Russian vodka.

Fearful of becoming banal without the stimulation of alcohol, Scoblic realizes that a sober life has its own richness. In the end, she finds that sobriety is a life of unmissed opportunities, authentic love and forgotten dreams waiting to be rediscovered.

When a speeding car slammed into Molly Birnbaum while she was out for a run, she broke her pelvis, fractured her skull and ripped tendons in her knee. Those injuries, though severe, would heal with time and hard work. But for this aspiring chef, the loss of her sense of smell was more devastating by far.

In Season to Taste, Birnbaum vividly recalls what it was like to suddenly live in a world devoid of scent. “It was an invisible injury, potent and intense,” she writes. “It involved nothing concrete like crutches; physical therapy wasn’t a possibility. But the absence—the monotone blank, the indescribable pale of a scentless landscape—was more painful than the nights I hyperventilated in the hospital after knee surgery.”

At the time of the accident, Birnbaum—who writes a delicious, recipe-filled blog called “My Madeleine”—was about to begin studying at the Culinary Institute of America. She’d spent a grueling summer working in a popular Boston restaurant to prepare for school, washing dishes, cleaning wild mushrooms and herbs, peeling garlic and learning to trust her sense of smell to guide her cooking. And then, in the split second it took for her forehead to smash into a moving windshield, the neurons that connected her nose to her brain snapped. Her brain could no longer receive the messages about incoming smells. There’s even a name for it: anosmia.

Birnbaum began talking with experts in the science of taste and smell, trying to understand what had happened, and what would happen next. After recovering (physically, anyway), she moved to New York City in search of a job and a fresh start. Intriguingly, she began to get flashes of scent. First, rosemary, smelling green and woodsy. Then chocolate, followed by laundry soap, cilantro, cucumbers, old books. Slowly, she reclaimed her life, one scent at a time.

Birnbaum powerfully explores the science of smell and its ties to emotion, love and even memory in Season to Taste. This deeply personal recollection of recovering from a loss invisible to the outside world is a truly mouthwatering read.