Author and bibliophile Wendy Werris is in passionate thrall to the words of others. Werris’ memoir, An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the Business of Books, reveals how a life spent in the book business granted her a life well-lived, because of the generosity of books, because of the grand life tour they have given me. For Werris, daughter of a flamboyant Brooklyn-born mother, Charlotte, and television comedy writer Snag Werris (veteran staff writer for Jackie Gleason and other comic greats), a bookish life began because of my weird genetic goulash and a quest for air conditioning. On a hot Los Angeles day, she took refuge in the illustrious (and air-cooled) Pickwick Bookshop. She exited two hours later with a job one that started a long career spent in bookstores, publishing houses (including Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow imprint) and on the road, repping books and escorting famous touring authors.

Rakish humor is used liberally as Werris recounts the ups, downs, detours and inevitable speed bumps of her journey through the male-dominated world of bookselling. Nostalgic, funny and sometimes sad, An Alphabetical Life pays affectionate and insightful tribute to her family, chronicles strange and wondrous celebrity meetings (an odd one-night stand with Richard Brautigan and a beautiful dinner with George Harrison), peeks into the rich intellectual milieu of small book presses and the days of courtly book editors, and remembers a horrific experience of rape.

As she looks back upon decades of literary retailing, Werris makes many recommendations for good reads, inviting us to check out her favorites, from Rabbit Redux to 84, Charing Cross Road. Consistently illumining, her narrative is a staunch devotion to our rapidly vanishing independent bookstores, the intimate thrill of being alone with a fine book and the dogged notion that if ever she does retire, the sustaining effects of books will never leave me. Alison Hood is a Bay Area writer.

It’s enough to make you want to dig up Art Buchwald as soon as he finally reaches the grave and beat him with his own shin bone (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Though dying of kidney disease, the irascible Buchwald still manages to tickle in his new memoir Too Soon to Say Goodbye. After suffering kidney failure and refusing to undergo dialysis, Buchwald enters a hospice with less than a month to live. But his body isn’t quite ready to take the dirt nap. While the rabbi, mystified doctors and weeping relatives wait, Buchwald dictates his living will (cremation, ashes scattered on Martha’s Vineyard), plans his memorial service (Carly Simon sings I’ll Be Seeing You, Tom Brokaw and Ken Starr deliver eulogies), and pens this book about the dying experience, set in the Requiem typeface, no less. I never knew how many perks were involved, he writes of his nine-months-and-counting death experience. I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist shamelessly drops the names of an endless parade of dignitaries and celebrities who come to visit (Walter Cronkite, Ethel Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, Mike Wallace) and observes the greeting card industry from a unique vantage point apparently Hallmark hasn’t found a hospice equivalent to Get Well. Buchwald is at his best dissecting world events with his surgically precise humor, and in suitably brief vignettes revisiting his childhood in foster care, his career in journalism and his marriage.

As readers hold one long collective breath (the acute kidney disease is now simply chronic) Buchwald also teaches, in true Buchwald fashion, that you should talk to people in hospice like they’re really there, and when one person brings a dish you like, ask for the recipe so someone else can make it for you, too.

When I picture the late Hunter S. Thompson, it is not a photograph I see, but a caricature of him in a floppy hat and aviator sunglasses, carrying an elegant cigarette holder. Images like this one have been produced for almost four decades by Thompson’s longtime friend and travel companion Ralph Steadman. A flamboyant artist, Steadman illustrated many of Thompson’s best-known articles and books, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now the artist turns author in his new book, The Joke’s Over, a memoir of his escapades with Thompson.

The pair first met in 1970, when Steadman traveled from his native Britain to illustrate a magazine article Thompson was writing on the Kentucky Derby. They spent most of the trip drinking and taking drugs, and it culminated with Thompson spraying Steadman in the face with Mace. But it also resulted in some wild, cutting-edge writing and illustrations, and gave birth to Gonzo journalism. Their subsequent assignments had them covering The America’s Cup yacht race, the 1972 presidential campaign, the Watergate hearings and the infamous road trip to Las Vegas in search of the American Dream.

Steadman’s memoir is bittersweet. At times he writes of Thompson in affectionate terms, at others he accuses him of being a cold-hearted acquaintance who cheated the illustrator out of royalties on their books. Yet their sometimes chilly 35-year relationship warmed in the latter years, and Steadman was among the 300 mourners at Thompson’s 2005 funeral, when his ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot-tall tower. Steadman was there from beginning to end, and thus has license to write a credible tale about life with Thompson. Hunter was a different animal, Steadman observes. He learned the balance between living out on the edge of lunacy and apparently normal discourse with everyday events. The Joke’s Over is a must read for both longtime fans of Thompson, and the curious who want to learn about a risk-taking writer who left his indelible mark on American journalism. John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

<b>Kenya’s green warrior</b> In many African nations, being a voice of dissent is tricky business in the post- colonial era. With the damage done by former European rulers still evident, power-hungry figures routinely dismiss concepts like press freedom and open elections as misguided attempts to reinstate Western domination over sovereign states. But 2004 Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai (The Green Belt Movement) never relented in her attacks on what she deemed oppressive measures and actions by the Kenyan government of Daniel Arap Moi. She also didn’t let entrenched traditions limit or restrict her opportunities for education and advancement, nor silence her advocacy on behalf of Kenyan women. Maathai emerged as an inspirational figure not only in her native Kenya, but around the world. Her memoir, Unbowed, recounts her amazing story and details her long fight against corruption, greed and outdated social conventions.

During her youth, Maathai ignored those in her village, including her parents, who loudly proclaimed that girls neither needed nor should want education. After studying with Catholic missionaries, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biological science in the United States, and eventually became East and Central Africa’s first female doctorate holder and the first to head a university department (veterinary anatomy). Soon, she extended her efforts into the fields of environmentalism and politics. Despite constantly being vilified and attacked by the Moi government, Maathai encouraged and recruited others to join her campaigns. She helped create the Green Belt movement, an initiative that restores indigenous forests while also putting much needed funds in the hands of rural women.

Maathai spearheaded a drive for widespread governmental change that transformed a dictatorship into a constitutional democracy. Finally, after various conflicts that simmered and recurred throughout the late 20th century, a new day began in Kenya. Maathai not only won a Nobel Peace Prize, but also a seat in Kenya’s Parliament and a post as deputy minister for the environment and natural resources. Her story as told in Unbowed reaffirms the notion that one person truly can make a difference, no matter how vast the odds or how difficult the quest. <i>Ron Wynn writes for the</i> Nashville City Paper <i>and other publications.</i>

Malika Oufkir’s first book, Stolen Lives, told the horrific story of her 20-year imprisonment in Morocco. The eldest of six children of the closest aide and friend of King Hassan II, Oufkir spent most of her childhood and adolescence in the seclusion of the court harem, surrounded by luxury. In 1972, when she was 18, her father was executed after a failed assassination attempt. Oufkir, her five younger siblings and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony for 15 years, the last 10 in solitary cells. Recaptured five days after an audacious escape, Oufkir and the others were officially free, but unable to leave their home, carry on friendships or lead ordinary lives. In 1996, the family finally fled Morocco to begin anew.

Freedom: The Story of My Second Life, Oufkir’s follow-up memoir, details her struggle to create a normal life outside her homeland. First in France, then the United States, Oufkir confronts the abundance of food available in supermarkets, shocking after all those years of prison deprivation and hoarding even the smallest crumb. Equally frightening to her is how technology makes the world a small place; Oufkir learns how to live in a world where her appearance on Oprah makes her an international celebrity.

Oufkir’s story is filled with hope. Living for the first time as an adult, she grabs our attention with her observations and humor, reminding us of the basic freedoms we take for granted: friendship, love and the ability to build the lives we dream about. Her most poignant passages detail her quest to find love, and eventually, a child. My first man, the one who was to make a real’ woman out of me, came into my life shortly after I was freed from prison. I was a 43-year-old virgin, she writes. I have to relearn everything about being a woman, from the beginning. . . . I want to be a woman, at long last. Kelly Koepke is a freelance writer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

<b>Elizabeth Edwards’ survival stories</b> Parents, political junkies and life’s survivors that is, most of us will be caught up in the stories told by Elizabeth Edwards in Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers. This elegant memoir begins as Edwards discovers a lump in her breast just two weeks before the 2004 presidential election in which her husband, John Edwards, was the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Showing the pluck, smarts, self-depreciating humor and grace that she seems to display no matter the situation, Edwards puts off the biopsy until votes are counted, then discovers she has breast cancer. That cataclysmic event triggers memories of the many strangers, relatives and friends who have loaned Edwards the use of their metaphoric walking stick to help her get a bit further on life’s journey.

She discusses growing up on military bases across America and in Japan as the daughter of a naval aviator, her marriage to a politician, their grief after losing their cherished teenage son Wade in a car accident, helping their surviving daughter cope and move on to Princeton, and their decision to have two more children, Emma Claire and Jack. As Edwards accompanies her husband on the campaign trail as senate, vice presidential and presidential candidate, the former attorney also hosts lunches, speaks at dinners, hugs people, answers endless questions from ordinary citizens who hope for a better life, and leans on their kindness, too.

Moving from city to city each night, Edwards realizes that it’s the small gestures, the thoughtful service of the garbagemen, the compassionate doctor and the grocery bagger, neighbors and fellow PTA members who post on a grief bulletin board, as much as powerful people in Washington, that ease her way in the world. Everywhere I go, people smile back at me, she writes, so this . . . is a shout from up on the tightrope: thank you all.

Don’t ever read a Bill Bryson book while drinking a carbonated soft drink, or (as in my case) draft root beer. A snort of laughter inevitable in a Bryson book will send frothing bubbles up your nose or (as in my case) out your nose, which can be momentarily very painful, albeit exceptionally amusing to anyone in your immediate vicinity. Bryson’s latest, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, chronicles the writer’s early years in Iowa, as well as the rich history of his alter-ego, the valiant Thunderbolt Kid, scourge of villains worldwide (well, perhaps just Iowa-wide). The Thunderbolt Kid arrived in Des Moines in 1951 (electron year 21,000,047,002), dropped off in a silver spaceship by his father, Volton, who hypnotized the Bryson family into thinking that Bill was a normal boy. In the manner of a latter-day Mark Twain, Bryson spins tales of everyday events that somehow transcend normality to a plane of wonderment and humor. When his father was once invited out for Chinese food, he reported back incredulously to the family: They eat it with sticks, you know. His mother’s horrified reply? Goodness! In one of a series of Midwest-inflected vignettes, Bryson rats out his sister, who could spot celebrity homosexuals with uncanny precision: She told me Rock Hudson was gay in 1959, long before anyone would have guessed it. She knew that Richard Chamberlain was gay before he did, I believe. For boomers, Bryson’s latest will serve up a steaming course of nostalgia for times long gone (he and I were born in the same year, as was Sting, but I digress): Sky King, TV dinners, the Brooklyn Dodgers, X-Ray Spex, Sputnik, Dr. Kildare, the Cold War, Tareytons and Strato Streak V-8 engines. For those who arrived later, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid will still be a hilarious look at bygone days, but you may need help from an old Saturday Evening Post or that old bald guy down the street to understand some of the references. Whatever your age, you will yuk it up big time reading Thunderbolt Kid. Just don’t forget what I said about the soft drinks.