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.

When Ralph Nader’s photo first appeared on the cover of a national magazine, a family friend called his mother to congratulate her. Really? Rose Nader replied, I think I’ll go out and get a copy. That’s his mother in a nutshell, Nader indicates in his new book The Seventeen Traditions, which covers his childhood and his upbringing at the hands of loving but firm parents.

Born in Lebanon, Nathra and Rose Nader taught their four children the values (or traditions ) of hard work, study, self discipline, respect for others and keeping one’s personal success even national fame in perspective. Nader also praises the rural New England setting in which he grew up. It taught him a respect for the earth’s natural resources while instilling in him a love of solitude, serenity and a voluntary simplicity allied with fiscal responsibility.

In some respects, The Seventeen Traditions chronicles a swiftly disappearing way of life characterized by long hours spent laboring at a family business, unremunerated civic involvement and religiously attended family dinners. At other points, Nader challenges modern notions of child rearing. Notably, he doesn’t think children need a voice in what food is served on the family table. Readers may or may not think the Naders’ child-rearing methods speak for themselves depending on how they feel about the often controversial career of writer, consumer advocate and U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who is better known for his exposŽs of unsafe autos than for his homespun wisdom. (Nader’s consumer advocacy is the subject of a documentary, An Unreasonable Man, to be released this month.) Interestingly, Nader anticipates this problem in his final chapter. As evidence of Rose and Nathra’s excellent parenting, he offers not himself but his two sisters, both of whom hold doctorates, and his brother, who founded a community college. His siblings model the kind of civic involvement and professional achievement that his parents expected when they chose a quiet Connecticut village as the stage to raise a family.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

In her first book, the best-selling First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung recalled her Cambodian childhood under the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge army. As told in Lucky Child, the second chapter in her story is no less powerful or painful. She begins on her first day in the United States after fleeing Cambodia with her eldest brother and his wife. Ung left behind her other beloved siblings, as well as the ghosts of her parents and two sisters who were slaughtered by Pol Pot’s soldiers.

Everything about America is strange to the young girl the language, the bland food, the television programs. Ung yearns to make friends in her new school, but her fellow students mistake her poor English for stupidity, so she spends recess alone, devouring junk food and warding off thoughts of the time in her not-so-distant past when she nearly starved. While Ung is happy to be away from the landmines and the aftermath of Pol Pot’s brutal regime, the guilt of leaving her family behind seeps in, as do vicious memories of the brutality she witnessed.

Ung’s story is even more potent because she also tells the story of her sister, Chou, who remained behind in a rural Cambodian village. While Ung learns the ways of an American girl circa 1980, Chou spends her days doing backbreaking chores and helping raise her nieces and nephews. She cannot attend school and must wait for her family to arrange a marriage for her. The book culminates with the sisters’ reunion more than a decade later, a scene touching in its honest awkwardness and uncertainty.

Lucky Child is a painful yet lyrical story of the lengths to which one family will go to protect its own. Ung offers a devastating look at the enormous global effects of political oppression. Yet for all the sadness in her personal story, Lucky Child is also a soaring tale of human spirit. While no one would wish for the Ungs’ painful history, one can only hope for a family filled with such generosity and strength. Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

When he was a kid in New Jersey, Steven Sorrentino loved his neighborhood luncheonette, “an exotic destination where grilled cheese sandwiches and double-decker dreams were served up in no short order.” Little did he know that one day he’d wind up behind that luncheonette’s faded Formica counter, an order pad in one hand and a spatula in the other, with hopes of a Broadway musical career temporarily trashed. The scene thus set, the curtain rises on Act One of Luncheonette, a wacky, poignant and brutally truthful memoir of family, fast food and filial love.

New Jersey, Christmas Eve, 1980: Sorrentino’s father is felled by a mysterious illness that completely paralyzes his lower body. On December 26, the author, in the role of dutiful son, steps up to the proverbial plate to run the family luncheonette and shelves his song-and-dance dreams to spend four years in front of a sizzling grill. He soon realizes, however, that it is not his father he must rescue, but himself. A young gay man not yet “out” to his New Jersey friends and family, Sorrentino gradually slips into a paralyzing despair, while his crippled father, ironically, finds renewed mobility and meaning through a career in local politics.

Written in short, wittily titled “acts,” with a keen, acidly observing eye, Luncheonette serves up a slice-of-life, a coming-of-age story with dark humor, straight-up characterizations and bald honesty. A supporting cast of luncheonette eccentrics adds special spice: waitress Dolores, profane queen of malapropisms; abstemious Half-cup Harold; lugubrious Tombstone (a local gravedigger); and curmudgeonly Herck the Jerk. All worthy memoirs offer epiphany, and Sorrentino’s dishes out rueful realization: “When it comes to family business, I have always been a slow learner. . . . I didn’t need to know everything right away . . . true wisdom is parceled out into short orders, coming from the most surprising places, at the most unexpected times.” And, if you’re hungry for more truth, Luncheonette imparts another lesson: the secret to the perfect porkroll-egg-and-cheese sandwich is to fearlessly plunge in, score the meat and break the yolk.

<B>The spy who didn’t love it</B> Lindsay Moran’s resignation from the CIA didn’t cause the furor that George Tenet’s did, but don’t let that stop you from reading <B>Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy and Other Misadventures</B>. Moran was young, adventurous, fresh from her valedictory speech at Harvard and a little bored when she decided to work for the CIA. She already had several years of training behind her, so why not serve her country while traveling the world? OK, as Moran admits, her training consisted mostly of reading Harriet the Spy books. She rethought her decision.

A few years later, however, Moran again felt herself drawn to the agency, which is where the book’s fun begins. Nothing is as she expects it to be: her recruiter’s limp is not the result of a shoot-out with opposing agents but was acquired at the hands of the FBI during a softball game. The CIA headquarters is, according to Moran, "a colossal structure that is bafflingly and alarmingly well-marked by large signs reading CIA,’ " yet the higher-ups believe the custodial and cafeteria staff to be unaware of their true employer. Armed with a clever sense of humor and an active imagination her field reports must have been masterpieces Moran fills <B>Blowing My Cover</B> with stories of her training at the Farm in Langley, Virginia, and her efforts to cultivate foreign agents in Macedonia. For the most part, her adventures are more "Boris and Natasha" than <I>The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</I>.

This is fine until one realizes that Moran’s tenure immediately preceded September 11, 2001. Her growing feelings of futility and her disdain for the agency’s old-school mentality lead to her decision to leave "the Company." Her comments about the CIA’s inability to foresee and adequately react to terrorist attacks echo conventional wisdom about the need to revamp U.S. intelligence organizations. Though Moran was generally frustrated by her experiences, the overall tone of this memoir is not despair. How could it be with lines like: "I half expected to find a flask of Jack Daniel’s in my own butt crack when I went to bed that night."