A long-lasting trend, and one that hasn’t gotten tiresome, is memoirs about how rock music matters. Music is such a personal experience—Air Supply may remind you of your first love; it reminds me of interminable childhood car trips—that every writer brings a different approach to the material. It makes for some great books (e.g., Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape). Now you can add another to the list: Steve Almond’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, wherein the author recounts his life as a “drooling fanatic,” or DF, which includes a gigantic record collection and a slightly unhealthy attachment to certain bands and artists. “Chances are, the only periods of sustained euphoria in our lives have been accompanied by music,” Almond writes of DFs.

For Almond, he was doomed after discovering the Police’s Outlandos d’Amour in his older brother’s bedroom. He eventually becomes a music critic, an occupation he finds surprisingly unfulfilling. When Almond embraces adulthood in Miami, a local musician destined for stardom sets the tone for the author’s salad days, though both end abruptly. He then learns how to write fiction thanks to the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits and meets his future wife Erin—”a former metal chick with literary aspirations.” Almond breaks up his narrative with lots of lists and “interludes” on Styx, Toto’s “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” and how Erin almost canoodled with ‘80s rock has-been Kip Winger.

Somehow a meeting with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters ties everything together for Almond, who never comes across as a snooty analyzer or an overbearing gossip. Whether he’s writing about the depressing beauty of “Eleanor Rigby” or stalking a favorite musician in the men’s room, there’s observational sharpness, unflinching honesty and biting humor. You’re compelled to read to see how music and love and life intersect for him. The result is the nonfiction equivalent of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a knowing and exhilarating look at how one man dove headfirst into rock music and emerged on the other side intact.

Pete Croatto is a New Jersey-based writer and editor.

Randi Davenport’s harrowing new memoir is the kind of book to which the only appropriate response is sympathy. The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes begins, ordinarily enough, with a picnic. But from the first pages, it’s clear that something isn’t right. Davenport’s teenage son, Chase, refuses to walk across a bridge, eat outside with the other picnickers, play Frisbee or sing songs, and his mother is not surprised: “Despite my high hopes, and I had many, there was never any possibility of staying with the others,” for Chase is not capable of it. Since toddlerhood, he has been diagnosed with a long list of conditions, including ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism and epilepsy, among many others. Though it might seem as if Chase’s condition could get no worse, the next day he suffers a psychotic break which leaves him obsessed with terrifying enemies he calls “nailers” and executioners, convinced he is a rock star, unable to recognize his mother and eventually confined to a psychiatric ward.

The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes alternates between the story of Chase’s life up to this moment and his subsequent months in the hospital. Davenport describes how she missed signs of possible mental illness in her ex-husband, Chase’s father, and tried to believe that Chase would be OK, until it was clear that he wouldn’t. She recounts the toll Chase’s illness has taken on his younger sister, Haley, and her efforts to make it up to her, knowing that she can’t. At the same time, she describes Chase’s deteriorating condition, his doctors’ failures to diagnose and treat him effectively and her own desperate attempts to find an appropriate placement for him, after her insurance company refuses to pay for his hospitalization any longer.

Davenport writes in sometimes excruciating detail about the pain that disability and mental illness wreak on entire families. She is a strong advocate, both for her son and for the disabled and mentally ill, arguing that “Our profound unwillingness to care for those among us who cannot care for themselves: that’s the problem.” One hopes this book has helped to alleviate her own pain.

Rebecca Steinitz is a writer in Arlington, Massachusetts.

It’s the ’70s. Laura Bell graduates from college a pretty and promising young woman, but success nevertheless eludes her. While others eagerly and easily trade in their caps and gowns for careers and cars and families, she feels lost, unsure she knows how to make a grab for life’s proverbial brass ring. Comfortable around horses, drawn to a nomadic life and feeling “alone, unmoored and unworthy,” she believes she can hide her young, uncertain self in the wilderness of Wyoming, out among “the sage and rocks and transient lives of the herders.” She leaves the security of her parental home in Kentucky, takes up residence in a “sheep-wagon parked under the bare-branched cottonwoods of Whistle Creek Ranch,” and hopes for an inviolable escape. But the austere existence of a sheepherder holds surprises. “The isolation,” she writes candidly, “. . . tossed sharp splinters of life straight back up in my face, waking me to the crack of thunder, the smell of rain that hadn’t yet hit the ground.”

Part lyrical remembrance of a deeply intense relationship with nature in a sweepingly majestic landscape, part unswerving self-analysis, Claiming Ground delivers both beauty and unabashed reflection. It follows Bell’s journey down many trails: cattle hand, herder, forest ranger, masseuse. We see her as friend, lover, wife, mother, daughter. We witness her awkward progress in tendering tenderness; her anguish in divorce; her devastation in unspeakable loss; her brave willingness to put her battered heart back out there; her honesty. We admire her fortitude in rugged terrain and understand when she gives her all, “believing that a life can be built by hard work and a home created by sheer force.” We cry when she finds out it isn’t so, but take heart because she perseveres. “Time after time, things come together and they fall apart again,” she explains, “like breathing.”

You will find Claiming Ground in the memoir section, but it is not only a looking back; it is a guidepost to the possibilities ahead—the surprises that await us down our own trails.

Linda Stankard claims her ground in New York and Tennessee.

On the one-year anniversary of his kidnapping by Somali pirates and a subsequent headline-grabbing rescue, Captain Richard Phillips revisits his harrowing high-seas adventure in a riveting book, A Captain’s Duty.

In early 2009, as he prepared to depart for the African coast helming the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, Captain Phillips—a native of Vermont and lifelong merchant marine—bade an emotional farewell to his wife, Andrea, reassuring her with a promise to return home safely from his time at sea. It was a promise he had made many times before, and had always somehow managed to keep. This time, however, Phillips was quietly, yet all too keenly, aware of the danger awaiting him and his crew in the increasingly pirate-infested waters off the Somali coast.

As the Maersk began its journey, Phillips worked tirelessly to prepare his men for the worst—and when the worst indeed happened, his diligence paid off almost immediately. Within hours of the heavily armed pirates’ boarding and commandeering of the Maersk, Phillips successfully managed to separate the ship, crew and cargo under his command from their would-be captors, thereby fulfilling his captain’s duty. Unfortunately for Phillips, he accomplished this objective only at the expense of his own freedom. For five long days, he remained at sea as the pirates’ prized American hostage, floating with them on a ramshackle lifeboat in the unrelenting heat of the open ocean.

A Captain’s Duty begins with Phillips’ seemingly routine departure on board the Maersk Alabama and ends weeks later with his dramatic rescue and emotional homecoming. But Phillips does more than simply recount the details of his tense, and often terrifying, week of captivity. Through the numerous flashbacks and historical anecdotes that pepper his narrative, he paints vivid and touching portraits of both the merchant mariner’s life at sea and the family life he leaves behind—a life to which he was ultimately fortunate enough to return, with a renewed appreciation and sense of purpose.

Brian P. Corrigan lives and writes in Florence, Alabama.

Where to start with Laura Munson’s wise, introspective and maddening memoir, in which she recalls the summer of her husband’s discontent? One moment you’re getting lost in her lovely meditations on the Montana life she and her husband have created with their two young children. The next, you’re ready to take an impromptu road trip to shake some sense into her yourself.

When Munson’s husband tells her he doesn’t love her anymore, her response is, “I don’t buy it.” She calmly vows to stand by while he works through whatever demons are causing the crisis. Take a walkabout in Australia, she suggests. Go to helicopter school. Build a “man cave” over the garage to escape to. Just don’t ruin the good thing we’ve built with our family.

As he stumbles through the summer, flitting in and out of their lives while he fishes, drinks and tries to find himself, Munson and her children have what she calls “a season of unlikely happiness.” She takes pleasure in cooking and setting off fireworks with the kids. And she feels like someone has her back: “Real live angels are showing up all around me like my grandparents and my father are piping them through some mystical realm, right into my life. . . . Even the way the grocery store checkout woman winked at me the other day felt like she was in on it. It’s like they’re saying: Follow your instincts. You are going to be okay, no matter what.”

Based on an essay she first wrote for the New York Times, Munson’s book has some very smart, insightful things to say about marriage, family and her choice to subscribe to what she calls “the end of suffering.” And yet . . . can you really embrace a philosophy that allows a husband to get away with some breathtakingly selfish behavior? Is that enlightened or just naïve? And does it matter if things work out in the end? Whatever your answers, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is will certainly leave you thinking.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

The ancient Chinese tradition of foot binding involved using cloth to tightly wrap a young girl’s feet so that they would fit into three-inch slippers, because a Chinese woman’s beauty and stature was measured by the tininess of her feet. The practice would crush the bones at the end of a girl’s feet so that her toes could be bent under her heels. But foot binding was permanently outlawed when Communists took control of China, a fact Dean King (Skeletons on the Zahara) mentions in Unbound because it is symbolic of how, in some small ways, Chinese women were liberated by the Communist revolution.

King’s book tells the story of the women who joined the Red Army—an action revolutionary in itself—and participated in a historic military maneuver that would eventually lead to the Communist takeover of China in 1949. The maneuver, known as the “Long March,” began in October 1934 when the Red Army, surrounded by Chinese Nationalist soldiers, staged a daring retreat that would cover more than 4,000 miles and last over a year. Communist leader Mao Zedong and Nationalist General Chiang Kai-shek are the men most often associated with the Long March. But King chooses to focus on the 30 women who took part in the journey. Among this diverse group was Ma Yixang, 11, a peasant girl sold by her family; Wang Xinlan, 10, who came from wealth; Jin “Ah Jin” Weiying, 30, a college-educated teacher who became active in the Chinese labor movement; and Zhou “Young Orchid” Shaolan, 17, a nurse who refused to be left behind when the army tried to send her home.

King spent five years traveling the length of the Long March, interviewing those women still alive to tell their tales. Theirs are stories of courage, remarkable not only because of the physical and psychological rigors of their journey, but also because of their determination and leadership in a country not known for granting equal rights to women. China has always been a mysterious and secretive empire, but Unbound peels back the curtain to reveal a story of strength and survival.

John T. Slania teaches journalism at Loyola University in Chicago.

Comfort food—even the words are warming and evocative, and most of us have familiar foodstuffs to which we turn when times get rough. However, when Paula Butturini’s husband, John Tagliabue, was shot by a sniper while covering events in Romania for the New York Times in 1989, Butturini knew that comfort food was only part of what would be necessary to help him recover. So the couple returned to Rome, where they had spent their happiest times together. In a new memoir, Keeping the Feast, she recounts the terrible struggle both had to regain some normalcy in their lives, and the role that food played in their recovery.

While it took two years for Tagliabue’s physical injuries to heal, it was the devastating clinical depression into which he fell afterward that nearly destroyed the couple. For years, Butturini’s husband was so depressed he often couldn’t speak. Once an outgoing, compassionate man, he became a shell of his former self, isolating himself from everyone but his wife and the psychiatrist he saw several times each week. Antidepressant drugs had no effect on his problem; for months on end, he only got worse, bedeviled by crippling anxiety attacks, uncontrollable crying and morbid introspection.

At her wit’s end, Butturini turned to the best cure she knew: “Just the magic of honest food—fresh and wholesome—simply prepared and eaten together three times a day, from ingredients that Italians have largely been eating for millennia. Italy still celebrates one of the most primordial rituals of the human community, the daily sharing of food and fellowship around a family table; what better place to take ourselves to heal?”

Butturini’s gratitude at having food as a lifeline to cling to is evident on every page of Keeping the Feast. It is a celebration of the human spirit, persevering in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and a paean to the restorative ability of food to bring comfort and peace to our souls as well as our bodies.

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer and editor in Nashville.

The death of Roger Rosenblatt’s daughter Amy at age 38 was completely unexpected. She collapsed on the treadmill at home, felled by a heart abnormality that affects less than two thousandths of one percent of the population.

Statistics are of little comfort to Amy’s hard-working surgeon husband, Harris, who was left with three young kids: Jessie, 6, Sammy, 4, and infant James. Rosenblatt and his wife of 46 years, Ginny, decided to lend a hand, moving from Long Island to Bethesda, where they took up residence in their son-in-law’s guest bedroom. Their commitment was real. Roger scaled back his workload considerably; Ginny got back into a matronly rhythm that impressed her friends.

In Making Toast, an understated yet gripping memoir, acclaimed writer Rosenblatt recalls a period of loss, adjustment and memories as they became parents for the second time. Better known as “Boppo” to his grandkids, Rosenblatt doesn’t ask for sympathy or tears. He chronicles his new life as expert toast-maker and guardian/playmate/professor with a mixture of wonder and love.

What makes the book so absorbing is the way Rosenblatt interrupts his short chronicles—the slim book has no chapters—with a thunderbolt observation or statement. Ginny remarks that she feels like she’s now living Amy’s life; Roger initially eschews therapy because “we will never feel right again. No analysis or therapy will change that.” One section consists of the following: “Ginny has a choking fit at breakfast. It lasts only seconds, but Jessie freezes. Sammy runs from the room.”

Rosenblatt puts a life-altering event in simple, clear terms. By employing restraint (which, considering the circumstances, had to be excruciating), he reveals volumes about the power of family without wallowing in sentiment and self-help hooey. The big points come across loud and clear, including the following: A close family may suffer more, as Rosenblatt writes, but that closeness allows everyone to return to doing the simple, necessary things. Like making toast.

Pete Croatto is a freelance writer who lives in New Jersey.