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.

<B>Echoes of the South’s troubled past</B> The central story of <B>Blood Done Sign My Name</B> sounds distressingly familiar the murder of a young man by a reputed Klansman and his sons in a small Southern town. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Timothy Tyson’s book as the same old, same old. For one thing, the murder did not take place in the early days of the civil rights era; it occurred at the start of a decade more often associated with gas shortages, Watergate and Vietnam protests than with sit-ins. As Tyson explains, however, there were many civil rights issues left to be resolved in 1970.

"Many people nowadays think that after the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," he writes, "cafŽ owners and city officials read the news in the morning paper and took down all those WHITE ONLY and COLORED signs by lunchtime. But this landmark legislation did not make a dent in Oxford." Lingering racial tensions in the North Carolina town are only part of the story told in <B>Blood Done Sign My Name</B>. This is also a history of Tyson’s family and an exploration of how the killing of Henry "Dicky" Marrow affected Tyson, who first learned of it from a fellow nine-year-old the son of the accused. Tyson goes off on many tangents while meting out details of the murder and subsequent trial, but the crime is always lurking in the background.

If his reportage is reminiscent of Truman Capote and his storytelling evocative of Harper Lee, Tyson’s use of colorful phrases and wry observations bring to mind Homer Hickam’s depictions of Coalwood, West Virginia. Tyson describes the setting of the murder, for example, as a place where "the Great Depression came early and stayed late." His father, he writes: "drew on a deep well of spiritual strength, and was a Tyson from eastern North Carolina and therefore half crazy besides." While an entertaining read, Blood Done Sign My Name is, of course, a disturbing reminder of the country’s not-too-distant segregated past. It is also an insightful commentary on the latent issues still at work in today’s society.

<B>Wild things: a naturalist’s love story</B> In her new memoir <B>Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild</B>, Renee Askins, who founded The Wolf Fund in 1986, demonstrates the kind of deep natural wisdom and sense of awe at the wild that has distinguished writers like Edwin Muir, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold. Founded with the primary goal of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park, The Wolf Fund has largely succeeded, but Askins doesn’t minimize the animal lives lost or the resounding ironies that emerged in the process. Working to obliterate the us against them model she recognizes human concerns rather than enemy positions. Askins’ clear-eyed understanding of the pressures the organization experienced marks a welcome common-sense approach to conservation issues. She is not afraid to introduce difficult questions about wildlife management that The Wolf Fund experienced (for instance, to what degree should unendangered species be sacrificed to the endangered, and when does management morph into control ?). Askins relates wonderfully poignant wolf and dog stories. Human relationships take a back seat in the book until the end, as if, perhaps, her intense experiences with animals have opened her up to human beings as well. In the end, she writes, we are left to honor and allow the mystery, love the questions and the otherness and look to the wild unknown for the resolution to our environmental crisis.

At age four Joelle Fraser was smoking pot and drinking beer through a straw. A tow-headed free spirit, she roamed unchaperoned through the hippie-strewn streets of Sausalito, California, in the early ’70s, selling her watercolor paintings to strangers. As a teenager, she partied with her father’s 21-year-old girlfriend. Fraser’s experiences, recounted in her debut book, The Territory of Men, are the stuff of which unforgettable memoirs are made. Full of lively, honest prose that flows like poetry, the narrative of her life reads like an intimate conversation and is reminiscent of the work of Mary Karr and Lisa Michaels other gifted authors whose lives were shaped by hard-drinking, troubled parents with unconventional child-rearing styles. Fraser opens the book with the image of her pregnant, sweaty mother driving herself to the hospital windows down, hair flying while her father and his buddies smoke cigarettes, swig gin and sing California Dreamin’ in the back seat. Rowdy and a bit sad, the snapshot captures the essence of much of Fraser’s childhood. Set in northern California, the small towns of Oregon and the islands of Hawaii, Fraser’s story traces the events that shaped her restless spirit. Her mother leaves her father a likeable writer who works odd jobs and drinks away his dreams when Fraser is just a toddler. A steady stream of boyfriends and husbands follows, paving the way to Fraser’s understanding of relationships. Early on, she writes, I decided that it is always better to have a man around. With sharp candor, she tells about her own forays into love, from the awkward sweetness of a first kiss to the dull ache of a failed marriage. She finds herself drawn to violence, to prisons, to men who use her. And from her mother she learns how to leave. Still, Fraser writes about her parents and their choices with compassion and insight. The scenes involving her father are some of the most touching and graceful in the book. Without claiming to know all the answers, Fraser evocatively describes her mistakes, triumphs, disappointments and dreams. Her thoughts and feelings are beautifully rendered even when the portraits aren’t flattering. Ultimately, her vignettes fall into a larger pattern that resonates beyond her personal experiences. Full of truth, forgiveness and gentle introspection, The Territory of Men is an impressive first book from a promising young writer. Rebecca Denton is a copy editor and freelance writer in Nashville.

Jerome Charyn’s Bronx is a landscape of magic and passion. It’s the Bronx of the late 1940s and early ’50s, a place as vivid as Twain’s Hannibal or Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. With its Yiddish syntax, American yearning and stage full of unforgettable characters, Bronx Boy concludes the trilogy about the borough that Charyn began back in 1997 with The Dark Lady from Belorusse. That memoir, as well as its sequel The Black Swan, has the same unmistakable blend of mystery and eccentricity as the new volume, and all teem with convincing details of ordinary life in the badlands of New York City. If Norman Mailer had written Bronx Boy, he would have probably subtitled it memoir as novel/novel as memoir, for, as Charyn himself says in a note at the end of the narrative, this is an imaginative re-creation, often not intended to portray historical characters, places and events. A memoir of his junior high school years, Bronx Boy is actually a collection of surreal anecdotes framed by the voice and vision of the 13-year-old narrator, Baby Charyn.

The life Baby Charyn lives in the Bronx is an exciting one, to be sure. His gang is called the Bronx Boys, and their politics is the democracy of the candy store. Intelligence, talent and charisma are the ways to rise in such a place, and Baby Charyn has them all. He wins a contest for soda jerks sponsored by the gangster Meyer Lansky, becoming in the process the aide-de-camp of Sarah Dove, a beautiful drug addict and prostitute. He also becomes the main attraction at a roadhouse in New Jersey, a place that sits on stilts on the edge of the Palisades. The owner of the roadhouse, reminiscent of Jay Gatsby, is a hero of the badlands named Will Scarlet, a prince of thieves, but a man whom the narrator understands will disappoint me one day . . . as fickle and destructive as any prince of chaos. Will Scarlet is a gangster but not like Meyer Lansky, who calculates every move like a chess master. As Baby Charyn sees it, Will Scarlet had that Bronx disease: a deadly passion that created windstorms wherever he went. I lived inside that wind. It’s a dark wind of fantasy and nightmare that the narrator lives within a windstorm that shapes a dreamscape of beautifully surreal characters like Miranda, the six-foot-tall gang leader who has sex with Charyn in the hallway of her apartment while her blind grandmother sits nearby asking, What’s that noise? Miranda argues like Socrates and makes love like Emma Bovary. And she can fight like an Amazon. Any story of the modern Bronx is a narrative of warfare, and Charyn’s is no exception: And so we went to war. It wasn’t the Montagues and the Capulets, with their long knives and pretty words. It was the badlands, not the rich town of Verona. And I wasn’t heir to any fortune. I was a Bronx boy by way of Belorusse. We bivouacked at the candy store until Smooth Malone arrived with Lansky’s gorillas, carrying baseball bats Joe Dimaggio specials, with the Clipper’s signature burnt into the wood. Any story of the Bronx in the second half of the 20th century also centers upon the archetypal tale of escape. It is Dr. Baron, a one-time successful novelist turned English teacher at Ridder High School, who points the way for the narrator. He meets Charyn on the roof of the school to share his wisdom. A failed Dostoyevsky who cannot escape the Bronx, Dr. Baron gives Charyn the advice that is the thematic heart of all books about the district: Become a gardener, a hobo, a crook, but run, Baby, run. This is the story of the Bronx: escape or die.

Charyn escaped to tell the tale. And a wonderful one it is, crowded with egg creams and bar mitzvahs, gang wars and ghosts, stories and storytellers. A scion of Meyer Lansky and Flaubert, Charyn, in the end, is a Bronx boy with a blue feather as his pistol and his pen. Bronx native Dr. Michael Pearson directs the creative writing program at Old Dominion University.

In this much-anticipated follow-up to the best-selling memoir Running with Scissors, Burroughs tells the rest of his controversial story. As a successful 20-something ad writer in New York, Burroughs flourishes financially, but there’s no denying his addiction to alcohol (1,452 beer bottles fill his apartment at one point), and when his co-workers stage an intervention, he agrees to check into the Proud Institute, a gay rehab center in Minnesota. What follows is the story of Burroughs’ attempt to clean up his life, and deal with his addiction, one day at a time. His romance with a crack addict, as well as the pressures of everyday life, lead him into temptation. Burroughs’ narrative is full of humor, honesty and wit qualities readers have come to expect from this sensational young author. A reading group guide is available in print and online at www.picadorusa.com.

Call this book life-affirming, a saga of human survival, a tale of loss and victory, proof of the resilience of the human spirit it’s any of those and all of them. But Red Sky in Mourning is also a walloping good yarn that grabs your heart and tweaks your spirit and makes you think twice about sailing during hurricane season.

That’s what Tami Oldham and her fiancŽ Richard Sharp did in September of 1983, when they agreed to deliver the yacht Hazana from the South Pacific to its owners in San Diego, California. It seemed like a good idea at the time, especially for two people who were crazy about sailing, very much in love and planning a future together.

The couple’s good business decision, however, turned into a tragic catastrophe. Ambushed by Hurricane Raymond, a late-season storm, the Hazana “pitchpoled” and “flipped end over end,” losing its masts. The motor was also disabled. At Richard’s insistence, Tami reluctantly went below, trusting the tethers of their safety harnesses to keep them both secure. Suddenly, she heard Richard scream. She returned to consciousness 27 hours later in the wreckage of the ship, with her husband-to-be forever gone.

What happened in the next 41 days was alternately appalling and heartening. Tami sailed the wreck to land with the help of the sextant, which luckily survived the storm. Recounting memories of her earlier life and romance with Richard, Tami’s story ranges from metaphysical contemplation as she comes to terms with his death and copes with such mundane details as having her long hair matted in salt water for 41 days.

Amazingly, Tami still loves to sail and “is a 100-ton licensed captain with more than 50,000 offshore miles.” It’s apparent that she has never forgotten Richard, but 19 years later he is no ghost threatening her later marriage and children. The best lesson in the book takes place soon after the disaster, as she drags herself away from thoughts of suicide and despair: “If I was going to live, let’s get to living.” Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

Gordon Parks Jr.’s accomplishments as a photographer and writer are remarkable, but he has also been a composer, painter, director and producer. While he’s already penned one majestic book about his life, The Learning Tree, it was impossible to fully chronicle such a rich life in one work. A Hungry Heart puts his amazing career into perspective, with Parks recalling his personal triumphs and disasters and his encounters with such famous names as Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Malcolm X and various actors and athletes. Though longtime followers of Parks’ work will probably know many of the details in these stories, this new treatment lets him look back at harsher times and evaluate past decisions and actions. Sometimes there’s a hint of regret, as when he acknowledges the devastating effects that making the film Leadbelly had on his marriage. He also recounts in graphically descriptive language the impact hunger and suffering had on him both as a youngster and later during the Depression. A Hungry Heart is living history from an icon whose existence defines and illuminates the black experience. Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.