English journalist Sarfraz Manzoor peeks behind the curry curtain in modern U.K. Pakistani culture in his memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. As the rope in a tug-of-war between two cultures pulling in strikingly contradictory directions, he finds himself in a situation similar to that of Jesminder Bhamra, the young Brit of Sikh descent at the center of Gurinder Chadha's film Bend It Like Beckham. Instead of being infatuated with a now-aging footballer, though, he's infatuated with a now-aging rock icon.

Even for those of us rock fans no farther than a bus ride from the Jersey shore where he ascended to Bosshood three decades ago, Bruce Springsteen has come to represent all things American: hard work, hard play, hard rock. Oh, and one more item, even more precious to a young misfit whose hard-toiling immigrant dad regarded his passion as frivolity at best and wastefulness at worst – freedom. While Manzoor may have taken his obsession with Springsteen's lyrics and lifestyle several leagues beyond simple fandom, he does uncover a simple truth: No engine has sufficient horsepower to permit us to slip the surly bonds of our upbringing.

In some ways, Sarfraz's journey mirrors Springsteen's own: first rebellious, then reflective, finally reconciled. InManzoor's case, the last came a bit too late, as his father passed away the very same day Sarfraz's first byline graced the pages of the Manchester Evening News, proof positive that the Vauxhall assembly line – Manzoor senior's path – wasn't the only road to respectability.

When Manzoor visits America, both pre- and post-9/11, he's forced to confront the fact that his Muslim heritage and his British residency have conspired to tangle him in the roots he once longed to sever, and which now seem more comforting than confining. The mature Manzoor is now living out his own Springsteen lyric: "Some folks got fortune, some got eyes of blue / What you got will always see you through / You're a lucky man."

Thane Tierney's musings on The Boss may be found in the "World of Bruce Springsteen" feature on the Apple iTunes website.

While her Jewish "aunts" played mah-jongg in their Queens kitchen, young Martha Frankel preferred the "uncles" poker games in the living room every Friday night. By age 10, she had learned to read the Daily Racing Form and was accompanying her CPA father to the track. This early entree into gambling would come to haunt Frankel much later in life, when her world turned to Hats & Eyeglasses, a poker term for a losing hand and the title of her candid, conversational and even comical new memoir.

When Frankel's father died just before she started high school, she filled the void with alcohol, drugs and men, and smugly prided herself on never becoming hooked, like some of her relatives. As she developed a loving, stable relationship with her artist husband, she began writing articles for Details magazine and enjoyed immediate success, jet-setting around the world to interview celebrities.

Although Frankel hadn't touched a card since her parents' game nights, she returned to poker in her mid-40s to conduct research for a screenplay. For advice, she turned to a former professional player she knew; to her mother, who earned extra money playing during the Depression; and to Michael, a mentor who encouraged her during her first fearful Wednesday night games. Poker was so immediately thrilling that she refused assignments worth thousands of dollars to practice her game all day. When she needed to pay bills, she built her schedule around her Wednesday night games. And when she was good enough – and she was good all right – she scheduled her Hollywood interviews around lunch, so she could reach the casinos by evening and sleep in the morning.

Thinking her life couldn't get any better, Frankel discovered online poker and quickly became addicted. No matter that she was losing more money than she could hope to recover, that she was abandoning her family and friends. As Frankel confronts her shame and family tendencies, her raw yet touching storytelling will inspire gambling addicts, their loved ones and those who simply want to know more about this debilitating compulsion.

Angela Leeper is an educational consultant and writer in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Coming from anyone other than Julie Andrews, name-dropping would seem like bragging. Instead, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years simply offers the recollections of an extraordinary talent whose encounters with the theater and music glitterati of the 1940s, '50s and '60s shaped the formative years of her career. Andrews' writing is refreshing and authentic in its wide-eyed wonder, bolstered by her diaries and journals. Andrews performed with Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady and Richard Burton in Camelot on Broadway, married (and later divorced) legendary set and costume designer Tony Walton, hobnobbed with Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle, was mentored by the musical team of Lerner and Loewe, and became best friends withcomedian Carol Burnett. Walt Disney himself asked Andrews to be his Mary Poppins in what would turn into her Academy Award-winning debut film performance.

But the polished, refined Englishwoman whose accolades include Emmys, Golden Globes, a Kennedy Center Honor and three Tony Award nominations, started in 1935 as the oldest child of divorced parents, poor and poorly educated. When singing lessons from her stepfather opened a new world, Andrews took her big voice on the vaudeville circuit.

At times embracing her success, and at others overwhelmed by the pressure of providing for her family, Andrews honestly and often humorously recounts the seminal moments of her early career. While still in her teens, she sang for royals, debuted on the London stage and made her way to America's Great White Way. She lived in cold-water flats and luxurious apartments, found an island hideaway and struggled to balance the demands of fame and her own desires for security and home.

Always considered a class act by fellow performers, Andrews demonstrates in her memoir just why she's a grand dame of the entertainment world. She surely knows many dark secrets about countless theater, music and film legends, yet chooses to share only the best sides of them, and herself, in Home. Her generous nature shines through every word.

Mary Poppins is the first movie Kelly Koepke remembers seeing.

Masterful storytellers know to hook their audiences quickly, going right to the heart of things. And so goes novelist Isabel Allende (House of the Spirits) in her new memoir, The Sum of Our Days, whose first sentence roundly states: "There is no lack of drama in my life, I have more than enough three-ring-circus material for writing . . ." No paucity indeed; what ensues is an exuberant, unpredictable, melancholic and loving narrative that spans the 13 years after the death of her daughter, Paula. The book was conceived as an intimate letter to Paula, and is largely drawn from the long daily correspondence with Allende's own mother. "I will begin by telling you what has happened since . . . you left us, and will limit myself to the family, which is what interests you," Allende writes.

This story of family and extended family is certain to interest any reader; who doesn't enjoy a good dish of familial drama? The Sum of Our Days, however, may be especially delectable to writers and fans of Allende's fiction, as Allende generously reveals her creative inner world – the genesis of her many books, her fears and superstitions about writing (she must begin a new book only on January 8 of every new year), and the ways in which a diverse, eccentric pack of family, friends and experiences find their ways into her wondrous tales.

Allende does not hold back in recounting her grief over the loss of a daughter, and The Sum of Our Days is tinged with profound sadness in places. It is also a moving, often humorous, recollection not only of family, but also of essential friends, including exotic, warmhearted Tabra and the wittily wise Sisters of Disorder. Finally, this memoir is a lustrous meditation on placing the complexities of love and relationship, spirituality and suffering into a greater context. As Allende writes, "you have to forget facts and concentrate on the truth. . . . Gently, the waters will settle, the mud will sink to the bottom, and there will be transparency."

Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.

Should your copy of Lorna Goodison's From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island fall open at part II, you will find yourself reading about the arrival of a cricket team in a Jamaican town. The team's driver never makes it to the pitch, falling in love with a daughter of the town's leading family instead; thus begins Goodison's parents' courtship. Set in the 1930s, it's a tale of well-dressed men and women, beautifully furnished homes and close-knit families told against a backdrop of an island nation where, as within the Harvey family itself, African and colonial heritages mingle, sometimes with pride, sometimes with conflict.

From Harvey River combines family history with that of Goodison's beloved Jamaica. She describes how the Harveys settled the town named for them, how they met their respective spouses, their shopping expeditions and, in the case of her parents, how they adjusted to living in reduced circumstances in Kingston. Along the way she explores many tangents, each one an opportunity to introduce people like Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay; the "Rocksteady" beat; even a forgotten stitch: "Every once in a while, when the culture of a people undergoes great stress, stitches drop out of existence, out of memory. The hardanga had disappeared when the great Jamaican freedom fighter Sam Sharpe was executed in 1832. . . ." Though she says this book was handed to her in a dream by her late mother, and while she has previously written about one of her ancestors (the Guinea Woman) in particular, there's another reason for this story. Growing up, she writes, "never once were we introduced to a poem, a story, or a play by a West Indian or African American writer; and very rarely did we ever encounter anything written by a woman. I secretly began to remedy that, writing . . . poems and stories by a little Jamaican girl who wanted to see herself and her people reflected in the books she read." Goodison writes in the lyrical, image-filled passages common to poets turning to prose; hers are also imbued with a slight Jamaican lilt.
 

Charles Dickens would be appalled to learn that the dark corners of cruelty to defenseless children that his novels exposed back in the 19th century still lurk behind the glitz and glamour of the 21st. In Hope's Boy, a work of nonfiction, Andrew Bridge recounts his agonizing stay at "an immense, asylumlike facility" in Los Angeles where he is taken after being whisked away from his mother, frightened and alone, at age seven.

Bridge describes MacLaren Hall as a place "where otherwise ordinary activities . . . became grotesque events. . . . For bathing, after we stripped, staff marched us naked through MacLaren's corridors to its central showers and tubs, where boys of varying ages grabbed at one another as staff looked on and laughed. For discipline, being sent to a corner meant staying there for hours. Being told to go to your room was replaced with being locked in a basement." (Embroiled in lawsuits, MacLaren was finally shut down in 2003.)

Bridge's Dickensian saga continues when he is placed with a family that offers little guidance and no real affection. He remains there, largely forgotten, until he "ages out" of foster care at 18. That he is able to outlast his fears in "a silent race to sunlight," secure a scholarship to Wesleyan, graduate from Harvard Law School and become a champion of children still lost in the system, is nothing less than remarkable, but one success story does not a good system make. "As when I was a child," he observes, "foster care largely remains a world of young mothers and frightened children. Ask about their lives, and their grief fills the air. Mothers speak of wrenching loss, and children speak of unyielding loneliness." Bridge writes with honesty and tenderness of his own mother, a woman whose mental decline forces their separation, but who nevertheless taught him "what was right and what was wrong, what was sane and what was crazy, what was love and what was not." He clings to her memory, to the hope of her return, and to the name he knows her by—not "Priscilla," as his case workers refer to her, but the name forever in his heart, "Hope."

Luckily for the 500,000 children in foster care today, Bridge has dedicated his adult life to changing the system. Barely out of law school, Bridge was sent to Eufala, Alabama, to investigate an adolescent center where isolation cells were used to punish children. "Children sat on a mud-covered concrete floor," he writes. "Begging to be released, they banged against the cinderblock walls, leaving behind hand and footprint smears, red from Alabama's clay soil." Files and depositions revealed that two boys, David Dolihite (15) and Eddie Weidinger (14), who had attempted suicide, had both been kept in one of these cells for more than a week. When Eddie found David hanging from his shoelaces, he tried to save him by chewing through the knot. David lived but was severely brain damaged. Both boys, Bridge finds, had come to the conclusion in their young lives that "no more hope was left to borrow from the future." Bridge later became the CEO and general counsel of the Alliance for Children's Rights, and, following the disappearance and death of hundreds of foster children, he chaired a task force investigating the safety and well-being of children in Los Angeles County's care. In 2002, his continued efforts allowed more children to stay with their families and still qualify for federal child welfare assistance. Bridge is also a founding director of New Village, which opened in 2006 to help children in foster care and the delinquency system prepare for college or skilled employment.

Hope's boy made a success of his life, and now gives hope to others, helping them make a success of theirs. For a tale well told, and the courage and dignity to tell it without bitterness, for a message ultimately of hope, Dickens would be proud.

Linda Stankard writes from Piermont, New York, with hope in her heart.

Felicia Sullivan grew up in 1980s Brooklyn, in the un-hip section where poverty, drugs and crime are facts of life. The author's mother, Rosina, was herself a criminal and a drug addict, as well as a breathtakingly selfish and uninterested parent. Even worse, she engaged in emotional and physical abuse, frequent near-overdoses, and chronic unreliability—the epitome of a bad role model. The list goes on and on, and the sadness builds with every page of Sullivan's memoir, The Sky Isn't Visible from Here, as it becomes clear that the author's efforts to be a good girl did not capture her mother's attention.

Sullivan evokes the tempo of her confusing existence by jumping from the present to the past and back again; no matter the time period, there is always an underlying sense of the author's shame and yearning. Sadly, readers who have endured this sort of parent, or know people who have, will not find many aspects of Sullivan's memoir surprising or unfamiliar. As in many addiction memoirs, there are depictions of the inevitable consequences of drug and alcohol abuse—alienated friends, hours lost to blackouts, loss of a job and the like. Sullivan's, that is: While the author is a high achiever (she graduated from Fordham, earned a master of fine arts degree from Columbia, and is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee) she's also done a lot of shoplifting and consumed a great deal of alcohol and cocaine in her attempts to forget her past. Fortunately, she made peace with her former life, admitted and faced her addiction, and is now creating a new sort of future.

There is another bright spot in Sullivan's story: She has maintained a relationship with Gus, the kindest and most loyal of her mother's ex-boyfriends. She writes touchingly of their time together, and thanks him in the book's acknowledgements. It's heartening to learn that, despite all she has endured—and put herself through—she has maintained a loving relationship with this man, whom she considers her father. Of course, his affection can't make up for the grief Sullivan clearly feels at not having had the kind of mother she longed for. But he may well have been just the life raft she needed.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.