Kathy Harrison deserves a medal for taking more than 120 foster children into her Massachusetts home over a 15-year period. Her bustling family life is a joyous respite from the horrors faced by many of the abused and neglected boys and girls who find their way into state foster care, as recounted in Harrison’s first memoir, Another Place at the Table. Under her loving oversight, many of these lost children blossom into happy kids.

One Small Boat: The Story of a Little Girl, Lost Then Found is Harrison’s follow-up account of a particular child, six-year-old Daisy, whose violent, bizarre behavior spinning, flapping her arms and refusing to speak or eat has her mother and grandmother at their wits’ end. Daisy is not the usual foster child, though. She comes from a family of highly educated professionals who should have had the resources and skills to care for her. Daisy begins to thrive in Harrison’s patient, safe care. Then the tragic and all-too-familiar tale of Daisy’s abuse begins to emerge. The aftermath and the Harrisons’ emotional involvement in Daisy’s life are heartbreaking. Harrison and her family can’t help another set of siblings, Ruth and Mary Margaret, whose Christian fundamentalist parents have beaten and neglected them. The stories of the sisters and other vulnerable children serve as a powerful account of the enormously good work that foster parents everywhere do. One Small Boat is ultimately a hopeful recounting of Daisy’s tale, showing that Harrison and individuals like her are modern-day heroes, quietly and without fanfare shaping the futures of children whose parents and families are unable, unwilling or unschooled in how to provide nurturing environments. As Harrison writes, It isn’t usually about the big hurrahs. It’s about moments for kids when they can remember clean sheets and hot chocolate and that somebody was nice to them. Kelly Koepke is a freelance writer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Children’s author Sam Swope decided he needed a challenge and did he ever find one. Swope “adopted” a group of Queens, New York, third graders, giving them writing lessons over the course of three years. In I Am a Pencil: A Teacher, His Kids, and Their World of Stories, Swope documents the successes and heartbreaks of teaching schoolchildren who hail from some truly challenging backgrounds. Some speak limited English, while others come from families struggling in a foreign country. Miguel’s Ecuadorian father imposes his strict religious beliefs on his happy-go-lucky son. Fatma, by far the best writer in the class, stubbornly refuses to open herself up to Swope’s writing assignments.

Swope’s excitement is palpable when he discovers raw talent among his students, as is his disappointment when promising students give in to laziness or self-doubt. I Am a Pencil is a triumphant manual on both writing and life.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

An Iranian writer recalls her youth in the Land of No’ It is perhaps the direst disaster that can befall a writer: the loss of his or her cherished books, diaries, notebooks, the ultimate evidence of the writer’s existence, wiped out. It means the severing of crucial personal relationships, perhaps not yet articulated or even fully comprehended, from the words and writers of the past. It means a re-creation, in the purest sense, of the individual. And yet this immolation sometimes works the phoenix trick. This blow struck Roya Hakakian when she was 17, the youngest in a once-prosperous Jewish family in Iran on the verge of revolution. Looking back on that frightening era more than 20 years later, she captures her experiences in a haunting memoir, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God” . . . and the word created order out of chaos. Religion aside, the first phrases of Genesis are a succinct and powerful metaphor for the act of writing. The word is the expression of the essential self, and the manner in which we re-create our universe. Hakakian thought she had understood pretty well the upheaval of the late 1970s and early ’80s in her native Iran the deposing of the Shah, the increasing sway and eventual consolidation of power by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the purges that followed but once she began to write about that time, the act of writing both clarified and reshaped those events.

“Everything came into focus,” she said in a recent interview, “and I was able to make sense of things I thought were unconnected. You get engaged with your own memories, as if they were discrete. You don’t think how to present them, how they should be arranged, what context they should be in.” She also discovered how thoroughly the power of the word had affected her life. Hakakian, who has written poetry in Persian and translated the poems of Emily Dickinson (and who writes with the automatic rhythm of a poet), early on discovered that storytelling was a kind of code, and that she could bring into being a whole world just by writing in her notebook. She also discovered that despotism fears the Word (she tells a story of how she and her friends escaped into the mountains with books of poetry only to discover they had been censored before printing) and that the crudest form of the Word the splashing of the graffiti “Johoud,” which meant both “Jew” and “dirty,” on the wall of their home could be a terrible weapon.

Finally, in one of the most engaging sections of the book, she meets the teacher who will inspire her, the Harpo Marx-ish Mrs. Arman, who encourages her not only to write but also to find the great refuge that is literature.

That she owes much of her intellectual fearlessness to her upbringing is clear. First one and then all three of her brothers must eventually flee to America for anti-Shah activities, and when an almost cartoonishly fundamentalist Muslim takes over as principal of her school, Roya discovers that using words to make fun of the mini-tyrant empowers her and endears her to her fellow pupils.

It is also clear from her memoir that her family’s religion was central to her life in Tehran, and to the reversal of fortune they encounter. But oddly, it was something of a surprise to Hakakian. “I never thought that having been a Jew had played a part in who I was until I finished the book,” she says, “and if asked, I don’t think I would be able to articulate it, but I was clearly affected by being raised as a Jew. I sat down to write as a secular Iranian girl who had witnessed a revolution, but when I finished I realized how much more there was to the story.” It was a complex, often confusing identity. Her family seemed truly observant only at Passover, and yet it violently opposed her uncle’s going outside the religion to marry a Muslim woman. The Jewish Iranian Students Organization was where Roya and her friends spent their evenings, but it was founded to hurry the assimilation of Jews into secular Iranian society. There they mimeographed editorials about the war with Iraq, the perfidy of the U.S. and even the struggles of the Palestinians under the “Zionists.” And despite the enthusiasm with which the Jews of Tehran embrace the post-Shah regime, they quickly become familiarly and ominously segregated. Non-Muslims are ordered to drink from designated water fountains. Non-Muslim shop owners must display signs in the windows identifying the business as such; Jewish doctors who rush to treat wounded soldiers are rejected as “dirty.” And by the time her father seeks to renew their passports, they are rejected.

Finally comes the ultimate blow, and one that is delivered, in the name of her safety, by her own father. He burns Roya’s notebooks, her records, her Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen. “It is time,” her father says, with the heavy drumbeat of a concerto’s climax, “we leave for America.” Since coming to the U.S., Hakakian has worked as an associate producer at “60 Minutes” and directed several documentaries, including the critically admired “Armed and Innocent,” about child soldiers in Africa.

Hakakian now lives just outside New Haven, and occasionally contributes essays to Connecticut Public Radio. Though she has begun work on another book, she says it is not about Iran. Eve Zibart is a writer for The Washington Post and the author of numerous books, including The Unofficial Guide to New York City.

Wendy Kann lives a comfortable suburban life in Connecticut. Her three children don’t worry whether there’s enough fuel in the car to make it to the grocery store, or that their mother might never return from the errand. Her small nephew, who lives on a rural farm in Zambia, does. His mother, Kann’s youngest sister Lauren, died in a car accident there. The phone call announcing this event brings a flood of memories of a tumultuous upbringing that prompted Kann to write Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa. Kann and her sisters came of age during the 1960s and ’70s, when civil war transformed this volatile region from the British colonial outpost of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. Colored by the mental instability of their mother and the early death of their father, the sisters’ unsettled family life mirrored the civil instability of their country. Kann recollects friends fighting to keep white rule, and how the nationalist movement’s victory dismayed and disillusioned many, including herself. She tells of whites suddenly sleeping behind locked gates, and eyeing their black servants with suspicion even as they continue to order them around.

The stark relief of the disparity of Kann’s sophisticated life in the United States contrasts with Lauren’s exotic yet bleak existence. Lauren’s nearest neighbor in the dusty outback of Zambia is miles away, flies and dust plague the household, squatters imperil the crops, and when the phone works, it’s only for a few precious minutes. Kann says that any Out of Africa illusions she or Lauren might have had were quickly quashed under the weight of drought, malaria and loneliness.

It is the anchor of her sisters’ African lives Kann’s sister Sharon still lives there and the tugging past of her homeland that moor Kann’s tale.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at least in part a tragedy of unacknowledged similarities. On one side, you have a proud people forced out of their traditional homeland, ill-treated in their diaspora, desperate to regain and hold what they fervently believe is their land. And on the other, you have exactly the same thing. Yet that likeness has led not to mutual accommodation, but to unending violence. The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan, reduces the tragedy to two families and one house in a moving story of both grief and hope. Ahmad Khairi, a furniture-maker from a prominent clan, built the house in 1936 in a town where his family had lived since the 16th century. He, his wife Zakia and their eight children fled to Ramallah in the West Bank during the 1948 war that followed the creation of Israel. Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi, refugees from Bulgaria who had barely escaped the Holocaust, moved into the empty house and raised their daughter Dalia there. The book focuses on the second generation, the inheritors of the strife: Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi, Ahmad’s oldest son. When the outcome of the Six-Day War in 1967 in effect opened the border between Israel and the West Bank, Bashir and two cousins sneaked across to visit their hometown. Some Israelis rebuffed them, but Dalia opened the door and invited them in, starting a tentative friendship. Both Dalia and Bashir turn out to be remarkable people, in very different ways. Dalia, a teacher, seeks reconciliation; Bashir becomes a well-known Palestinian nationalist lawyer perhaps even a terrorist. The two families are divided by politics, but continue to be drawn together by their common humanity. The lemon tree of the book’s title, planted by the Khairis and nurtured by the Eshkenazis, becomes a poignant symbol of the relationship. Tolan, who first told this story in a public radio documentary, is admirably even-handed, alternating between the points of view of the two families and their respective nations. The book has no neat solution. But just as the Khairis and Eshkenazis learn each other’s better qualities, we come to understand more about both sides. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Paul Rusesabagina has never considered himself a hero or an activist, even though his actions saved the lives of more than a thousand people. He was the manager of the Hotel Mille Collines in Rwanda that sheltered members of the Tutsi clan and Hutu sympathizers in the middle of horrific slaughter. His exploits were dramatized by Don Cheadle in the film Hotel Rwanda, but Rusesabagina’s new autobiography An Ordinary Man (written with Tom Zoellner) shows that the movie only scratched the surface in depicting the magnitude of the carnage and the impact it had on his life and family. Rusesabagina, the son of a Hutu father and Tutsi mother, grew up on a small farm. He overcame numerous obstacles to become the first Rwandan general manager of the luxurious Mille Collines. Rusesabagina developed relationships and friendships even among those who considered him inferior. He also turned the hotel into one of Africa’s most profitable institutions.

Then the genocide began, and Rusesabagina used diplomacy, bribery and deception to shelter almost 1,200 Tutsis and Hutu moderates while mobs raced through the city. He describes in sobering detail the spectacle of seeing friends hacked to death, and his words underscore the frustration and helplessness he felt while his pleas for aid were ignored or unheeded. He survived 100 days in this captivity before order was restored. Sadly, Rusesabagina and his family can no longer emotionally abide living in his homeland and have relocated to Belgium.

An Ordinary Man is an extraordinary tale of heroism and sacrifice, told in steady, unrelenting and often self-deprecating fashion. It’s clear that Rusesabagina will never forget the atrocities he witnessed, nor completely forgive the West for its inaction. But rather than engage in bitterness, he uses the book’s final section to fervently insist that the world never again ignore genocide in any nation or on any continent. Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

<b>One man’s island</b> Everything about being in St. Cecilia is simpler, writes Robert Benson about the West Indies getaway he’s grown to love and protect like a beloved family member (he even gives the island a pseudonym to protect it). The way in which the natural beauty, quiet pace and warm community on this volcanic island eventually change the author is the subject of his travelogue, <b>Home by Another Way: Notes from the Caribbean</b>.

Benson, a spiritual writer and retreat leader, and his wife first encounter the island when they decide to give each other a beach holiday for their wedding anniversary. Under less than auspicious beginnings, they’re ferried across a misty lagoon in the dead of night to a simple idyll that in two short weeks would represent the values that they aspired to live every day.

More than a decade later, they’re still giving each other this journey away from the demands of work, children and homey clutter. They drive rental cars on the wrong side of the road, paddle in azure waters, read on the porch of their tiny cottage, and prepare meals in a kitchen with enough room for two cooks as long as they have their arms around each other. There are no theme parks, malls or movie theaters and not much to buy except pottery or honey (from bees that feed on exotic tropical flowers).

The characters and locations of this magical and beloved summer place become an annual meditation and talisman for a deeper existence, and the book ends as Benson and his wife mull over the possibility so familiar to vacationers who allow the warmth of eternal summer to melt into their bones of capturing the feeling full-time. Your life is shaped by the things that you desire, writes Benson, quoting Thomas Merton. And like any spiritual seeker, he realizes that he just may be willing to sacrifice all to achieve the blessing of simple solitude, with a backdrop of riotous bougainvillea and a turquoise sea, no less. Going to St. Cecilia may have started out to be about going to the sun, he writes. It is crossing a line about something else, it seems.

Roger Angell may be best known for his books on baseball, but his talents transcend sports reportage. The author of favorites like The Summer Game and Season Ticket has produced a new collection of essays in which his skills as a memoirist are amply evident. Let Me Finish contains 17 pieces that cohere beautifully to form an overview of Angell’s remarkable life, from his years at Harvard, to his service during the Second World War, to holidays spent with his mother, Katherine Angell, a longtime New Yorker editor, and his stepfather, beloved author E.B. White. Capturing the culture of 1930s New York, many of the essays evoke a time when movies cost a dime, manners mattered and divorces, like the bitter one that occurred between Angell’s parents, were a source of scandal. The author’s father, Ernest Angell, a brilliant and eccentric lawyer, personifies the period. Remembered fondly in the lively essay The King of the Forest, he presided over the family brownstone in New York, for a time as a single parent, giving his children Roger and his sister, Nancy a comfortable upbringing that included a series of governesses and servants from France.

Unscathed by his parents’ split, Angell spent many weekends and summers with his mother and stepfather on their farm in Maine. In Andy, an intimate and fascinating profile of E.B. White, he observes the pair at work, a New England light industry churning out material long-distance for The New Yorker. Both had 50-year affiliations with the magazine, and Angell would follow in their footsteps. Indeed, the book’s centerpiece is At the Comic Weekly, a delightful look at the author’s own five-decade tenure with the publication. Providing an insider’s view of the magazine, the essay is filled with unforgettable anecdotes and bits of harmless (but nevertheless delicious) gossip about the editors and writers Angell has encountered there. The names are awe-inspiring: William Maxwell, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, Ann Beattie. In writing about his early years on the staff, Angell recalls moving into his mother’s old office after a promotion and opening a closet door to find a tin of Coty face powder she left there 20 years before. Small wonder he should refer to The New Yorker as the family store. Angell’s essays possess all the charm and allure of the bygone days they describe. Nostalgic without being sentimental, they’re stylish, classy pieces written with the kind of clear-sighted integrity that characterized the work of his stepfather. Despite the implications of the book’s title, let’s hope Angell isn’t finished. They just don’t make ’em like this anymore.

While in high school in 1969, Mark Edmundson knew what he wanted from life. Although he seemed destined to the fate of many in his working-class Boston suburb days of labor broken by nights of drinking and pool playing he had one great love: football.

In practice, he was a warrior, initiated into the cult of manhood by coaches for whom pain was a myth, sweat the coin of the realm and victory the only acceptable proof of effort. In his new memoir, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, Edmundson recalls how he compensated for his nearsightedness by working harder than most of his teammates and relying on guts and determination. He also remembers the high school figure who most shaped his destiny.

But it wasn’t a coach it was a slender, mannered philosophy instructor. As Edmundson relates in this touching tribute to the teacher who changed his life, his class wasn’t sure what to make of Frank Lears on the first day of school. Lears wore secondhand suits, drank tea instead of coffee and arranged desks in a circle instead of orderly rows. The students responded with subtle, and later, not-so-subtle, defiance of Lears’ authority. But Lears posed a greater challenge to his students’ minds than they did to his authority. Even the steps Lears employed to counter the students’ defiance didn’t fit into the stereotype of disciplinarian that the kids were accustomed to. And despite himself, Edmundson found his thoughts turning to the questions Lears posed, implicitly and otherwise, in class. Eventually, Lears’ influence would surface in the ways Edmundson reacted to the Vietnam War, race relations and a host of other issues. But while it changed his opinions Lears’ philosophy class also had a much greater influence on Edmundson. True to its nature, philosophy taught him to think. Today Edmundson is an English professor at the University of Virginia, as well as a contributing editor for Harper’s. Crediting Lears with setting him on the path to his vocation, he has written a humorous, vivid recollection of the friends, teammates and antagonists who accompanied him through high school in the ’60s a memoir that is sure to resonate deeply with readers. Gregory Harris is a writer, editor and IT consultant in Indianapolis.

<B>America’s favorite teacher is back</B> Torey Hayden thought she had seen it all. As a veteran special-education teacher, she was used to working with children whose disabilities ranged from autism to Tourette’s syndrome. But she had never met anyone like Venus Fox.

In her latest book, <B>Beautiful Child: The Story of a Child Trapped in Silence and the Teacher Who Refused to Give Up On Her</B>, Hayden who has recounted experiences from her teaching career in several previous best-selling titles tells the bittersweet story of her work with Venus, a 7-year-old girl who refuses to communicate. Her virtually catatonic state is interrupted only by brief, violent outbursts of rage.

Intrigued and determined to break through Venus’ silence, Hayden tries a number of unsuccessful techniques. Unsure how to reach such an unresponsive child, Hayden spends her 20-minute lunch breaks alone with Venus, reading aloud to her and holding the little girl in her lap.

Progress is slow, in part because Venus is just one student in a class full of challenging kids, including twin boys with fetal alcohol syndrome, a boy with Tourette’s syndrome, an autistic girl and a violent 8-year-old boy. A breakthrough finally comes when Venus shows interest in a She-Ra, Princess of Power comic book. Though the blond-haired, blue-eyed heroine is not the most politically correct role model for an African-American child (as a disapproving principal and a teacher’s aide point out), Hayden uses Venus’ interest in the character to engage her in role-playing games that reveal the depth of the child’s despair. By the time Hayden learns the tragic truth about Venus’ home life, it’s almost too late.

Told with compassion and sensitivity, <B>Beautiful Child</B> takes the reader into a world where unfailing patience and dogged determination don’t always yield tangible results, but where the few and hard-won victories can be life-changing. Hayden’s first-person narrative also sheds light on the frustration many teachers experience in the face of limited resources, bureaucratic red tape and well-meaning pedantry. With vivid and detailed writing, Hayden recounts not only her trials with Venus, but also her triumphs and failures involving other children in the class. She doesn’t hide the fact that her job is exhausting; instead, she writes openly about her exasperation with the children’s frequent fistfights, tantrums and general unruliness. She also describes small victories that point to progress and hope.

This straightforward tone keeps Hayden’s story from sounding self-indulgent. She doesn’t profess to be a saint just a dedicated teacher with an inspiring story to tell. <I>Rebecca Denton is an editor and writer in Nashville</I>.

A reporter for Time who worked in Tehran from 2000-2001, Moaveni writes perceptively in her latest book about what it’s like to be a permanent outsider, forever caught between two cultures. Raised in California, she is the child of Iranian exiles. As a youngster, she is privately obsessed with the country her parents fled when the Islamic Revolution took place. Refusing to smile or smoke in public, she adapts the habits of an idealized Iran, which she perceives as a mythical paradise, a country of artistic and intellectual ferment. In 2000, she travels to Tehran to work as a journalist and find out for herself what the country is really like. Although she mixes well with other Iranians, she is viewed as an outsider and because she isn’t married a curiosity. The struggle of Iranian women is a point of focus for the author, who comes to view their cautious steps towards a more liberal lifestyle as a sort of jihad. Moaveni is a skilled writer and thoughtful observer, and she presents a fascinating look at daily life in a country that elicits both love and hate from its inhabitants. Offering all the background readers could hope for from such a book, she provides a wonderful synthesis of viewpoints, perspectives and customs the conclusions of a traveler who isn’t quite sure where home is. A reading group guide is included in the book.

What does a hip, arty, self-interested and semi-committed couple in a closet-sized New York City apartment do when they tire of their jaded lives? They decide to rescue a dog with issues, of course. Canine turns into guru and delightful mayhem ensues in Rex and the City: A Woman, a Man and a Dysfunctional Dog. Author Lee Harrington writes the award-winning eponymous humor column for The Bark magazine, and in her book she relates the life-changing events stemming from the fateful summer day when she and her live-in boyfriend Ted stopped at a shelter ( where John F. Kennedy got his dog she notes) to just look. With memories of beloved childhood pets running through their heads, they bring home a growling, cowering spaniel-mix puppy named Rex who refuses to act like any dog they’ve ever known. Tension mounts in the cramped apartment as the restless couple (she is an aspiring novelist, Ted’s a documentary filmmaker) struggle to adjust and promptly begin to argue over everything from how to discipline the dog and where he should sleep to his hunting breed identity. When Rex develops separation anxiety right around puberty, all bets are off on who goes first the dog or their relationship. Harrington’s wry, self-depreciating intelligence is completely winning as she readily admits her insecurities and captures their struggles to form a family in a sophisticated, yet isolating city. While the story sometimes feels stretched to book length, with plenty of paragraphs on the emergence of the adorable Rex’s inner Lassie, not one dog lover on earth will turn down a metaphoric walk with this loveable pair and their kooky canine.

Though she was only a child, the memory of cheering white soldiers on to victory in the Rhodesian war haunts Alexandra Fuller, and probably always will. Fuller, author of the acclaimed memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, understands that war which ultimately led to black minority rule and democratic elections probably as well as anyone alive today.

It was a war about race, she explains in her latest book Scribbling the Cat. Minority white leaders did not want to surrender the upper hand in Rhodesia, later renamed Zimbabwe. Even so, the good guys are not always so easy to sort from the bad guys: black soldiers fought on the side of white oppression and black communities have been known to nurture their own tyrants. On a visit to her parents in Zambia, Fuller concludes that writing about the war from the point of view of “K,” who fought to keep Rhodesia white, will unlock previously untold secrets. She contrives to travel with him to Mozambique, the site of many war atrocities. They travel in about the worst discomfort imaginable unpaved roads, a dearth of modern plumbing and no refrigeration. Being on the road with a nosy journalist might try anyone’s patience, and K is no exception. Adding to the tension, K has a crush on Fuller. Fuller hopes to deliver something meaningful about the nature of war and the scars it leaves on its fighters, especially those whom contemporary ethics have found to be in the wrong. K discloses gruesome memories; most shocking is his assault on a young village woman who later died after betraying the location of Rhodesian liberation soldiers. But K’s stories don’t add up to much in the way of revelation or insight.

“Nothing K and Mapenga had told me, or shown me and nothing I could ever write about them could undo the pain of their having being on the planet,” she writes. Her frustration in trying to make sense of war’s horror is her finest point.