Named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by the New York Times, this powerful memoir marks the debut of a promising new author. Trussoni was raised in Wisconsin by her overbearing, emotional, occasionally violent father, Dan. A Vietnam veteran who served as a tunnel rat during the war, Dan is haunted by his experiences and a bit too fond of the bottle as a result. A patron of Roscoe’s, a local beer joint, he brings Danielle along to the bar most evenings. She soon begins cutting class and stealing. Meanwhile, her siblings a brother, Matt, and a sister, Kelly are being raised by her mom. Trussoni recounts her eventful adolescence years marked by family brawls, drug use and Dan’s dark moods with unflinching honesty and humor. She eventually travels to Vietnam in an attempt to share in her father’s experience there, and the passages about her journey are moving and profound. Trussoni’s gradual acceptance of her flawed father will resonate with readers. The difficulties Dan goes through as he tries to come to grips with his years in Vietnam make for heart-wrenching, all too timely reading. This is one hell of a coming-of-age tale, told by a gifted writer who isn’t afraid of self-exploration and who is brave enough to lay bare her own imperfections as she tries to achieve closure with her troubled family.

Reading master pastry chef Roland Mesnier’s All the Presidents’ Pastries: Twenty-Five Years in the White House, you can’t help but wonder how the last five presidents still managed to fit into the Oval Office by the end of their terms. Surprisingly, Mesnier’s life before he got to the White House was at least as interesting as the years he spent satisfying the dessert palates of the world’s leaders.

Following in his brother’s footsteps, Mesnier left his small village at age 14 to enter the traditional French apprenticeship system. With an incredible drive to master new skills, he moved on to some of the world’s finest hotels and pastry shops. He cooked in the legendary kitchen of London’s Savoy, discovered how to create sugar sculptures despite the intense humidity in Bermuda, introduced an entirely new set of pastries at one of the oldest hotels in the U.S. without the staff even realizing that they’d been retrained and began winning award after award for his work.

From this illustrious beginning, Mesnier moves on to describe the events, the desserts and the people he encounters throughout his White House tenure. Aside from a couple of near-misses (one with a marzipan figure of a sleepy Mexican), Mesnier successfully created extravagant desserts reflecting national cultures, cuisines or historical events, from a chocolate military aircraft carrier for George W. Bush’s birthday to five white doves made from lemon sorbet placed on a nest of fresh fruit, each with a sugar olive branch in its beak served to Yitzhak Rabin to signify the Oslo accords. Packing 25 years of desserts into one book can occasionally begin to read like a laundry list, and it’s slightly odd to hear someone wonder if a planned barbeque will be cancelled when discussing the early hours of 9/11. But being executive pastry chef at the White House is no ordinary job and Mesnier follows his own golden rule to a tee: Never forget where and for whom you are working. Megan Brenn-White graduated from the chef’s training program at the Natural Gourmet School of Cookery and is the author of Bake Me a Cake (HarperCollins).

At 12, Ishmael Beah was a bit of a naughty boy. He didn’t bother to tell anyone where he was going when he, his older brother and a friend set off to walk from their village in Sierra Leone to rap and dance in a talent show 16 miles away. He thought there was no need, because they’d be back soon. Rebel troops chose that day in 1993 to attack his village, burning the houses and slaughtering or driving off the inhabitants. Ishmael never saw his family again. When he was 13, the Sierra Leone government army press-ganged him into a unit of boy soldiers to fight the rebels. By 15, he was a hardened cutthroat, too drugged and traumatized to feel any pity when he killed.

Beah did ultimately escape that life, through luck and cleverness. Now a 25-year-old American college graduate, he has written A Long Way Gone, a memoir of exceptional power. Beah doesn’t bother much with the convoluted politics behind the civil war that seems now finally to have ended, though he does include a helpful chronology at the end of the book. This is his deeply personal story. In vivid detail, he takes us inside the mind of the boy he was: frightened, depressed, hungry, helpless, alone. When the little boy is first handed an AK-47, he is terrified of it. His superior officers, including a lieutenant who quotes Shakespeare, make the boys into killing machines by feeding them drugs and playing on their desire to avenge families massacred by rebels. Beah’s own psychological turning point comes when two friends are killed while fighting beside him. After that, he has no trouble pulling his trigger. Even after he has the good fortune to be turned over to a United Nations rehabilitation program, Beah’s shell shock doesn’t end. Weeks of monstrous behavior is followed by years of migraines, flashbacks and crippling survivor’s guilt. The recovered Beah now works with Human Rights Watch and speaks out for children’s rights. A Long Way Gone is compelling evidence for that cause.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Even people from slightly less remote villages in Papau New Guinea could barely imagine visiting the corner of the jungle where Sabine Kuegler grew up. The resident Fayu tribe had been engaged in decades-long civil warfare and all contact with the outside world had been forgotten. Enter a German family with three children under the age of nine and two linguist parents who are intent on documenting the Fayu language. Kuegler would later be trapped between her primitive upbringing and her European heritage; she grew up a true child of the jungle, which is the title of her memoir.

Kuegler learns to speak Fayu, shoot a bow and arrow, and always shake out her boots in case of scorpions. Though her family receives occasional supplies from the outside world, Kuegler eats a local menu: The huge red ants were quite popular and easy to find. . . . Grilled bat wings are nice and crispy. . . . ever-present grubs were another tasty alternative. She witnesses tribal warfare, the process of stealing young girls for wives, massive floods and disease, but in Child of the Jungle she focuses on the benefits of growing up in a tropical paradise.

Admitting in the preface that as an adult she is unhappy and feeling lonely and lost, lives the life of a vagabond seems a completely appropriate reaction to such a huge transition and an honest ending to a story that is incredible and very real at the same time. In spite of the compelling subject, however, the book can be disjointed at times and readers will have their curiosity unsatisfied (save for a short chapter at the end) about Kuegler’s transition to a boarding school in Switzerland at age 17. In addition, although her parents were not technically missionaries, they did want to bring peace to the Fayu and their impact on the traditional way of life is completely unquestioned by their daughter. And yet, Child of the Jungle, a bestseller when published in Europe two years ago, is well worth reading.

Megan Brenn-White has written and edited for the Let’s Go travel guide series.

Although journalist Tom Bissell was only an infant when South Vietnam finally fell to the communists in 1975, the war that culminated in that event has cast a particularly tenacious shadow across his family and his own psyche. Bissell’s father was wounded in Vietnam and after leaving the service in 1967, watched in disgust as politics and ineptitude sullied the blood that he and his comrades had spilled there. As Bissell sees it, the injuries the war inflicted on his father had a lot to do with his parents divorcing when he was only three years old.

In an effort to better understand his father and the war, Bissell constructs parallel histories of each. The first part of The Father of All Things imagines his father’s mood and actions at home the day Saigon fell. On April 29, 1975, my father was losing something of himself. . . . This was the certainty that what he had suffered in Vietnam was necessary. Interspersing these agonizing scenes are well documented, near photographic accounts of how Saigon and the U.S. Embassy in particular were overrun. In the second and longest section of the book, Bissell describes the journey he and his father made through Vietnam in 2003. Alongside this personal chronicle, he lays out the stages of that country’s turbulent evolution and assesses what it has become today.

Bissell’s obvious adoration for his father is balanced nicely by his ongoing annoyance at the older man’s caginess and unpredictability. While there are many revealing moments between the two, there is no epiphany that cleanses everything. The father’s sense of self will forever be shaped by his war experiences, but now the son can feel that he’s shared in them, however minimally.

All this ruminating about the tentacles of the past might have become intolerably grave or dreary. But Bissell’s wandering and deliciously wicked eye keeps this from happening. Still, war is always a horror story. And as Bissell strives to put the ghosts of Vietnam to rest, one can see the ghosts of Iraq arising behind another generation. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Mary Childers’ large, fatherless family moved from one dilapidated apartment to another. Even when the family seemed to be trading up, moving out of a basement flat to a walk-up with a little more space and a smattering of trees nearby, the neighborhood’s true character slowly revealed itself, becoming just as depressing or dangerous as the last. “We’re the John the Baptists of Urban Decay, alerting our fellow man to what’s coming,” Childers writes in her memoir Welfare Brat. Having watched her sisters follow in her mother’s footsteps of choosing the wrong men and inevitably becoming pregnant, from an early age Childers devoted herself to breaking the cycle and becoming the first in her family to attend college.

Knowing that Childers succeeded, eventually earning a doctorate in English literature, doesn’t make her story any easier to read. It is a sad one, especially when she writes about ignoring her own birthday because there are too many other expenses among them the October birthdays of three of her siblings between September and Christmas. Or when she describes her sister’s stunned reaction to a surprise party and sums up the peculiarities of her family: “In some households, Where do presents come from?’ is a more perplexing question than Where do babies come from?’ ” Welfare Brat is more than a memoir of growing up with the weight of the world and the baggage of Childers’ family on her shoulders; it is also a portrait of New York in the 1960s and America during the era of the “Great Society.” Childers and her family move into neighborhoods as other whites are fleeing, and she touches on the friction between ethnic groups, between generations and between traditional and slightly more progressive Catholics. Despite the tension of the times, Childers feels fortunate to have come along when she did, writing: “I had the good luck to come of age when people in the United States approved of a war on poverty rather that what Herbert J. Gans calls the war against the poor.'” Rather than becoming dependent on the system, Childers used every opportunity to escape it.

Readers who pick up Goldie Hawn’s new memoir in search of a steamy Hollywood tell-all may be disappointed. Though the 59-year-old Hawn, a show-biz insider since the ’60s, doubtless has plenty of those types of tales, her introspective memoir, co-written with British journalist and author Wendy Holden, focuses more on Hawn’s lifelong journey to wisdom and self-fulfillment.

Each of us goes through transitions and transformations, Hawn writes in the preface to A Lotus Grows in the Mud. The important thing is that we acknowledge them and learn from them. That is the idea behind this book. Not to tell my life story, but to speak openly and from the heart. Expressed by any other star, this sentiment might be scoffed at, but coming from Goldie Hawn, one of America’s most personable and beloved performers, you can believe it’s genuine. Goldie Studlendgehawn was born on November 21, 1945, and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Her parents were both performers her mother ran a dance school, and her father played the violin. Hawn was an entertainer from an early age, and in Lotus she shares stories of her childhood, her days as a go-go dancer, her first taste of success on Laugh-In and her transition to Hollywood leading lady and brilliant comic actress. She also speaks openly about her two marriages (to Gus Trikonis and to Bill Hudson, father of her first two children, Oliver and Kate) and her relationship with longtime partner Kurt Russell. The two met on the set of the 1968 film The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. Russell played a lead role, while Hawn had a bit part. When they met again on the set of the 1984 film Swing Shift, the two began a romantic relationship. They’ve been together ever since and had a son, Wyatt, in 1986, but they have not chosen to marry. As Hawn explained to Harper’s Bazaar in April, A marriage paper doesn’t do anything but sometimes close a door psychologically. I’ve always said, if I’m in a cage and you leave the door open, I’m going to fly in and fly out, but I’ll always come home. She and Russell divide their time among their homes in California, Aspen and Vancouver, where their son, Wyatt, plays hockey. Over the course of her career, Hawn has received many award nominations and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (for her performance in Cactus Flower). She and Russell run a successful production company, Cosmic Entertainment. But as she reveals in her memoir, perhaps her favorite role is that of mother to her children. She’s also a grandmother in 2004 her daughter Kate Hudson had a son, Ryder, with her husband, former Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson. Being a grandmother is amazing, Hawn told the San Francisco Chronicle soon after Ryder’s birth. It brings unbelivable joy. Joy comes easily to Hawn, who says the ability to choose happiness is in my DNA. Though she continues to grow spiritually and intellectually, the actress believes that fundamentally, she hasn’t changed much since her Laugh-In days. I’ve grown up, Hawn says. I’ve gone through the trials and tribulations of life. I’ve lost my parents since then. I’ve had two failed marriages. Yet the essence of that person I was has remained. Fans will enjoy getting to know that person in this frank, reflective memoir.

Author and journalist Caille Millner has been dealing with unique situations most of her life, from being a black woman growing up in a mostly Latino neighborhood to moving into and through the worlds of Silicon Valley and the Ivy League. The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification takes readers inside these diverse universes, spotlighting Millner’s ongoing personal and political evolution as she encounters white supremacists, techno geeks and embittered post-apartheid South Africans. Along the way, she discovers the difference between being truly educated and simply possessing knowledge, comes to grips with rifts and conflicts within the black community, and concludes that the sum of her unique parts really make a most attractive, if complicated, whole. Millner, co-author of The Promise: How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of First Graders to College, is at 27, a member of the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board. Written in a witty, alternately self-deprecating, satirical and revealing manner, her memoir offers a fascinating portrait of a gifted and articulate writer.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

Marlena de Blasi’s new book, The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria, is primarily a story about waiting, albeit waiting in a place most people would be grateful to visit as a tourist. The book begins, as did the genre-defining A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, with the requisite property search, but de Blasi has been living in Italy for years and is married to Fernando, also known as the Venetian, and they navigate the rocky waters of Italian real estate relatively easily. They find an apartment in a decrepit old palazzo (hence the title) owned by the Ubaldini family in Orvieto, apparently one of the least welcoming but most picturesque towns in Italy. The apartment, a former ballroom, is missing a floor and in-fighting among the extended Ubaldini clan has left it vacant for decades, but negotiations are successfully concluded and de Blasi and Fernando move to a temporary apartment as renovations begin. Temporary becomes more than two years and they fill their time with work (de Blasi is a food writer, her husband a retired banker, and they lead small tours of Italy) and getting to know Orvieto and its inhabitants. We meet a hearty peasant woman with prodigal culinary gifts ( Miranda-of-the-Bosoms ), a wise old man who has suffered the loss of his true love, a rundown noble and a quirky pair of shepherds, but they rarely move beyond their typecast roles. Months after moving to Orvieto with no end to the construction in sight, the author writes, I have discarded the notion of control and allowed myself to be seduced by the beauty of the wait. De Blasi may have allowed herself to get too complacent; there is too little depth here to bring the place and the people off of the pages and into our hearts. Still, there are certainly beautiful moments in The Lady in the Palazzo as well as some wonderful descriptions of life as a writer and cook in Italy.

Megan Brenn-White has written and edited for the Let’s Go travel guide series and is the author of Bake Me a Cake (HarperCollins).

For a great many Americans, the late Strom Thurmond will forever be remembered as the thin, nasal voice of racism, militarism and regional insularity. In 1948, this well-born South Carolinian bolted the Democratic Party because of its advocacy of civil rights for blacks and ran for president on the States’ Rights (Dixiecrat) ticket. Ultimately, he joined the Republicans and went on to become one of the most conservative members of the U.S. Senate. Thurmond retired from the Senate in 2003 at the age of 100 and died a few months later. Although he gradually moderated his early views on race, he never explicitly renounced them. But ol’ Strom, as he came to be known, did have a festive side: He loved young ladies and in this he was colorblind, as evidenced by the author of the strangely engaging autobiography Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.

In 1925, when he was 23 and just out of college, Thurmond seduced and impregnated 15-year-old Carrie Butler, one of his family’s black housekeepers. After their child, Essie Mae, was born, Carrie entrusted her care to her older sister, Mary. Essie Mae and her family moved to Coatsville, Pennsylvania, when she was still a baby. She was 13 before she saw her birth mother again. On their first trip together back to South Carolina, Carrie walked her daughter to Thurmond’s law office and, to the child’s utter bafflement said, Essie Mae, meet your father. Washington-Williams’ emotionally conflicted story spins out from this point.

Father and daughter would meet discreetly for the rest of Thurmond’s life, sometimes even in his Senate office where his staff assumed she was a constituent. He was, she says, consistently courteous and generous giving her money with each visit and paying for her college but he never embraced her as a daughter. There is a constant tug in her mind between the genteel, always welcoming gentleman she sees behind closed doors and the demagogue she reads about. Washington-Williams withheld her link to Thurmond from her children for years and resisted her family’s urging to go public as a way of undermining Thurmond’s racist ravings.

Just as fascinating as the author’s account of coming to terms with her father are the parallel recollections of what the country was like for well-educated, upwardly mobile blacks at the height of the civil rights struggle. In the end, and without conspicuously sentimentalizing her memories, Washington-Williams displays the compassion and evenhandedness any father even an absentee one would be proud of. Ed Morris writes from Nashville.