You will not enjoy this book. It isn't possible to enjoy it. It is brutal. It is ugly. It is violent, callous, cruel, capricious, vicious. It is war.

You will not put this book down and feel satisfied. You will not feel content. If you put it down and feel you know what is happening and why, and that you have a solution, then you felt all those things before you read the book and have brought them along to your reading of it. The book offers none of these things.

If you are against the war you will probably remain against it. If you are for the war, you will probably remain for it. If you seek clarity on the war, you will continue to seek it. What do you gain from this book? The only thing possible to gain: perspective.

War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq is one man's perspective, mulled within the filter of that man's own assumptions and understandings, but it is a deeper perspective than one gets on the nightly news, or the pages of a paper, or pro and con rants on the Internet.

For the last five years, NBC correspondent Richard Engel has served in Iraq (with a year in Lebanon), heading the NBC bureau for the region, covering the war. He has seen colleagues kidnapped. He has seen colleagues die. He has barely escaped kidnapping himself. He has barely survived explosions, sniper attacks and firefights. He has seen things I will not repeat, except to say that sometimes the difference between a man and a wild dog is that a dog has the excuse and limit of instinct.

War Journal is not a pretty book, but it is a book worth reading. Engel's experiences were not limited to one side or the other. Fluent in Arabic and experienced with the culture and beliefs of the Middle East, Engel was able to pursue contacts and interviews with Sunni insurgents, Shiite militia and "official" Iraqi forces as well as U.S. soldiers and diplomats. His conversation partners ranged from Iraqi orphans to Iraqi prime ministers, culminating in a briefing with President Bush. The result for the reader is insight into many levels of the Iraq war, seeing the changing perception of it from many levels and many sides, including Engel's own.

This is very much a journey as well as a journal. In the midst of the violence and politics is a man struggling to come to terms with a world torn apart by horrors. He watches the violence dull the senses of his friends and coworkers, even as it scrapes his own soul. He reports on the strain the war places on soldiers' marriages as his own shatters. And like a doctor in a trauma ward, he moves into a realm of clinical detachment, pushing grotesqueries aside for the moment until they rise up again in the quietness of later.

Engel does not conclude War Journal with a solution, for either Iraq or himself. He ends only by wondering how the story will continue, and what will be the end purpose of it all. The book concludes with Engel back in Baghdad, there to cover what he cannot predict, wondering what it will mean for the world, himself and the people of Iraq.

Howard Shirley writes from Franklin, Tennessee.

Life on a boat sounds like a dream: sailing in and out of tropical locales, embracing the staggering vastness of the sea, seeing the world up-close and in living color. Then there's the reality: homesick kids, pirates, costly and time-consuming repairs, squabbling. Black Wave details John and Jean Silverwood's tumultuous, yet ultimately rewarding, experience on the Emerald Jane, their 55-foot catamaran. In a span of two years, the California couple and their four kids (ages three to 14 at the start), traveled from the Atlantic coast, into the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean.

Then, near the end of the adventure, the boat hit a reef in French Polynesia, and was ravaged, pinning John under its mast in the process. With help hours away and John slipping toward death, the family sprung into action, pulling him from the wreckage and keeping him alive. "There is no time to rehearse; whoever you are in those moments is exactly who you are," John writes. "It is who your family is, too." Jean Silverwood complements the book's nautical action with substance. She throws readers into the frenzy of the wreck and details the highs and lows of life onboard, coming across as personable, vulnerable and concerned – in short, a real person and not an adrenaline junkie.

Given the material, it's impossible for Black Wave to be boring; there's plenty to keep readers turning the pages a steady clip, making this an ideal beach (or boat) read.

What did you have for breakfast this morning? How about on June 11, 1997? You probably can't answer that one. But Jill Price can. If you give her any date from 1980 on, she can tell you not only what she had for breakfast, but every detail of the day—even the day of the week.

The Woman Who Can't Forget tells the story of a most remarkable memory—a memory so complete scientists have never recorded one like it. Price's recall extends back as far as 1974 with amazing clarity. She can even remember events from her 18th month in vivid detail. But if that kind of memory is a blessing, The Woman Who Can't Forget reveals that the blessing is decidedly mixed. Price's memory is perfect at recalling the emotions of her life as well as the facts. Even as she remembers pleasant experiences of love and happiness, she also cannot forget the most minor mistakes, or moments of loss, embarrassment, sorrow or shame. Her struggle to forget led Price to Dr. James McGaugh, a scientist in the field of memory research. Intrigued, Dr. McGaugh and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, studied Price's abilities, confirming the astounding accuracy of her memory and discovering new insights into just how human memory works. Price and Bart Davis have skillfully placed Price's life experiences within the context of that science. Through Price's story, the book becomes a window into the inner workings of the mind, posing intriguing questions and answering others. Why do we remember? Why do we forget? How much do our memories alter over time? Do our minds truly retain the full scope of an experience, or do we reconstruct it every time we "remember"?

The Woman Who Can't Forget is fascinating, whether dealing with the details of Price's life or with the science of the brain, offering glimpses not only into the mysteries of memory but into emotional struggles like depression, anger, forgiveness and even growing up. At times astonishing, at times moving, Price's story is one you won't soon forget. 

Howard Shirley is a writer based in Franklin, Tennessee.

In her latest book, Ann Hood, author of last year's semi-autobiographical novel The Knitting Circle, puts the reader on the harrowing frontlines of every parent's worst nightmare: a crisis involving a child. Comfort: A Journey Through Grief is Hood's account of the death of her daughter, Grace, and the aftermath of her loss. This is an intensely personal, painfully moving collection of essays that take readers to a place no one wants to visit.

Grace was a healthy, vibrant five-year-old when she contracted an especially virulent form of strep that ravaged her internal organs and, in less than 48 hours, took her life. Suddenly Grace was gone, leaving a heartbroken mother, father and eight-year-old brother, Sam. Hood could find no solace. The platitudes issued by well-meaning friends and relatives (recounted in the book's searing first chapter) only made things worse. It was when she learned to knit and joined a knitting group at a local yarn store that she was able to move toward some sort of healing. And, when Hood and her family adopt a new baby, joy finally returns to her life.

Hood's honest recounting of the terrible day and all the terrible days that followed does not spare the reader, instead giving an idea of just what havoc the death of a child causes. Reading what helped her (the dinners, the cards, the listeners, the knitting) might help the rest of us who wonder what to do and what to say when our friends and relatives face loss. Reading Comfort is a wrenching experience, but, when I shared this book with a dear friend who had lost a child, he agreed that Hood talks about loss in the most honest, useful way he has ever read. He was comforted by her words, even as they brought him back to the day when his own daughter died.

There are so many empty phrases that people say to those who have suffered loss, but the real truth is clear to Hood: "Time does not heal. It just passes."

Robin Smith reads, teaches and knits in Nashville.

Novelist Pat Conroy once observed, “A bad childhood is a constantly renewable resource.” No one knows the truth of that better than Augusten Burroughs. Since the 2002 release of his best-selling memoir, Running with Scissors, America’s favorite boy-raised-by-wolves has been mining his chaotic past with equal parts horror and humor. To recap: At 12, Burroughs fled the emotional hell of a cold and cruel father and caring but ditzy mother for the “safety” of his mother’s lunatic shrink, his Valium-gobbling patients and the pedophile next door. A fourth-grade dropout, Burroughs overcame childhood sexual abuse, earned his GED, and at 19 became a New York advertising wunderkind.

In Dry, his subsequent memoir about his advertising years, and the autobiographical collections Magical Thinking and Possible Side Effects, Burroughs continued his reconnaissance into the no man’s land of his past.

Through this brutal guerrilla war of self-reclamation, Burroughs has long circled but never actually captured his chief adversary. He rectifies the oversight in A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father. Despite its humorous, self-effacing marketing tag (“His first memoir in five years”), this may be Burroughs’ darkest journey yet.

Much of his new memoir takes place before the Running with Scissors days when young Augusten and his poet mother coexisted with his volatile father John Robison, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Burroughs was deeply in need of his father’s affection, yet at every turn he was harshly rebuffed. Deprived even of touch (what Burroughs calls “the Arms”) from his distant dad, he fashioned a scarecrow-like father surrogate to sleep beside. The craziness culminates when his father calls and threatens to kill his son.

What little peace Burroughs ultimately achieves at his father’s bedside comes more as a unilateral cease-fire. Perhaps the best closure he could expect is the realization that this bright apple has in fact fallen far from the tree.

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.