<B>A maverick’s take on the news</B> Jim Bellows, one of the most respected editors in journalism, made his name working for the smaller newspaper in town. And that was by design. While moving from daily to daily over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Bellows had a penchant for taking the smaller of a city’s two competing papers and revamping it to give the bigger one a run for its money.

In his colorfully written new autobiography, <B>The Last Editor</B>, Bellows tells the story of his maverick career at such publications as <I>The Miami News</I>, <I>The New York Herald Tribune</I> and <I>The Washington Star</I>, all of which are credited with revitalizing their cross-town counterparts: <I>The Miami Herald</I>, <I>The New York Times</I> and <I>The Washington Post</I>. By sparking vibrancy in declining, defeated newsrooms and fostering the talents of up-and-coming writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin, Bellows brought new life to dying dailies.

His philosophy was simple: We’ve got to get the other paper to jump in our pond. We’ve got to make waves. We’ve got to liven things up.

Structuring his book like a long newspaper story (the important stuff is placed up high, he tells us), Bellows recounts such memorable periods of his career as his stint with <I>The Washington Star</I>, a paper that had been overshadowed by the venerable <I>Washington Post</I>, which was guided by legendary editor Ben Bradlee and basked in the fame of the Watergate stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In a way, Bellows made his mark as the anti-Bradlee, tweaking the nose of the big daily by playing up stories the <I>Post</I> missed and incorporating new sections such as The Ear, an infamous gossip column. Never complacent, Bellows went on to infuse his vitality and philosophy into The <I>Los Angeles Herald Examiner</I> and then a series of broadcast and Internet media projects. <B>The Last Editor</B> is an enjoyable, lively account of his impressive career, written with all the verve and whirlwind energy that made the author’s life so memorable. <I>Dave Bryan writes from Montgomery, Alabama.</I>

Vincent was a giver. All his life he believed in, and put great thought into, giving gifts to his friends. Perhaps that is why he got so upset in ninth grade about the O. Henry short story, The Gift of the Magi, which tells about two gifts that went considerably awry. Writer Elizabeth Stone first remembers Vincent as an Italian kid she taught in a Brooklyn school, railing at the ending of the stupid story by O. Henry.

After that year, Stone heard nothing from the young man except for unilluminating Christmas cards. Then, 25 years later, in 1995, she received a carton filled with a decade’s-worth of his personal diaries, along with a letter he had written before he died of AIDS, asking her to make the journals into a book. With A Boy I Once Knew, a poignant new memoir that combines the story of Vincent’s life with her own, Stone fulfills his request.

What begins as a bewildering bequest turns out to be a true gift for the author. Stone doesn’t protest the time and energy she gives to the reading of the journals, a labor of liking that turns into love. Vincent’s emotional growth in his approach to death sends a powerful and timely message to the author, who never dared to deal with the deaths of her own grandmother and father. With the death of her mother approaching, the diaries could not have come at a better time for Stone.

Reading Vincent’s words, Stone relives his last decade, shuddering at the risks he took in living an unfettered gay life in San Francisco, knowing the inevitable outcome. But in his last few months he moved to a self-acceptance and apparent truce with his illness, and with the deaths of his friends in the gay community. Through his acceptance, Stone learns to come to peace with the realities of her own life. As a result of my time traveling with Vincent, I knew the terrain, and I knew what to do for my mother and for myself with surprising clarity, she writes.

In the end, Stone, better able to manage loss and grief, knows that there is a terrain beyond mourning, and that relationships can evolve and grow not only in the face of death but beyond. A gift indeed. Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

We face dizzying displays of abundance in modern American life. Our stores are packed with plenty, and we’re continually bombarded with ads that exploit our every desire. Does this excess ultimately affect our happiness? In new books, two authors explore this question and examine alternatives to the richly lived life.

Give It Up! My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less is Mary Carlomagno’s diary of deprivation, of the intention to eliminate unnecessary facets of life. For one year, she eliminated one thing monthly: in January, alcohol; in February, shopping; in March, elevator rides. Over the year, newspapers, cell phones, restaurants, television, taxis, coffee, cursing, chocolate and multitasking all got tossed. Chronicling her reflections on doing without, Carlomagno discovered the richness of simplicity and an awareness and enjoyment of the things in life that I was blessed to have. Anyone resolving to live a less cluttered life this year will appreciate her wry, honest account of doing without some of the things we have come to regard as indispensable.

Author Rick Moody’s first work of nonfiction lifts the veil on some of his own worst experiences from struggling with substance abuse and depression to surviving a destructive relationship with an ex-girlfriend. A sensitively written narrative in which he bares all about the discouraging times in his life, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions is a departure for the 40-year-old author, who has carved out a successful career as a fiction writer. His first book, Garden State, won the Pushcart Press Editor’s Choice Award, and his novel The Ice Storm was made into an acclaimed film by noted director Ang Lee.

Moody’s stay in a New York psychiatric hospital as a result of his severe depression makes up the prime matter of this memoir with digressions, but it also serves as a jumping-off point for his meditations on topics such as fathers and sons, his New England family lineage and the pain of modern-day adolescence. Moody also touches on the very personal difficulty of dealing with his sister’s sudden death.

Catharsis can have abject terror connected with it, Moody said in a recent interview. In this case, I wanted to write about things I’ll never need to write about again. As any essentially introverted person might, Moody has his phobias. He’s not keen about talking on the telephone, and he expresses anxiety about his upcoming book tour. I love bookstore appearances, but the media aspect can be demanding, admits the author, who lives on Fishers Island (off Long Island) and in Brooklyn.

What he’s not phobic about, however, is engaging as a writer with emotionally demanding material. In The Black Veil, his alcohol abuse, his explosive, codependent relationship with an ex-girlfriend (called Jen in the book) and the psychic dark hole that resulted in his hospitalization in Hollis, Queens, is prefaced by incidents from his superficially comfortable upbringing in Darien, Connecticut. But these topics are informed and balanced by an investigation into whether his depression might be hereditary, which Moody probes through family diaries and field trips to the Maine of his forebears. In chapters that alternate with Moody’s personal story, we are offered a scholarly deconstruction of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story The Minister’s Black Veil, from the famed author’s collection Twice-Told Tales. Hawthorne’s lead character, the Reverend Mr. Hooper, is based on the Reverend Joseph ( Handkerchief ) Moody of Maine, who accidentally shot to death a childhood friend and lived out the remainder of his life veiled in a spiritual darkness. Sifting through the evidence of his ancestry proves time-consuming and revelatory for author Moody. He discovers that his clan, while related to Handkerchief Moody, actually descends from the other side of the Moody lineage.

I had thought, Moody writes, since I believed that I was related to Handkerchief Moody, that there was a genetic inclination that had been preserved across the centuries, a vulnerability, an insight, a recoiling, a burden, a Moody style. . . . But it was becoming apparent that the more likely and reliable assumption was that the simulated tendencies of families were bits of mythology by which a family constituted itself. Families were, in this view, nothing in nature, and everything in recitation. What else did learning about the Moody ancestry teach him? That maybe some of my disarming markers are much more prevalent in my family, he says. It made me feel more human and less eccentric. When I get a notion to learn about a thing, I’m lucky to be able to make it into something that is interesting. That’s my job. In this case, my research took me personal places. In light of Handkerchief Moody’s grave childhood sin, Moody was also led to consider the social phenomenon of Columbine and similar horrific incidents. All through that rash of schoolboy killings, he says, I felt like, if I was in high school then, they would have had a 24-hour watch on me. I definitely would have fit into the category of socially awkward.’ Then there are some things that hit home even more directly, as when Moody’s sister died six years ago without warning, the victim of a cardiac seizure. Yeah . . . that’s a lifer, he says somberly. She was fine one day, then gone the next. But beyond the sadness and the depression and the emotional challenges, Moody’s volume functions best when it charts the interesting journey through the mind of a man trying to deal with who he is and achieve wellness at the same time. When I was at my worst emotionally, he says, it was as if I didn’t want to get better. I figured neurosis and eccentricity were part of my creativity. My issues are always gonna be there, but I know how to handle them better. I also feel I’m more compassionate than ever about other people’s pain. Writing such an intensely personal book can often have real-life consequences, especially where real people are concerned. In Moody’s case, the reception was surprisingly positive.

Everyone important in the book had read it in manuscript. They were all fine about it. My father and my ex-girlfriend were extremely supportive. In fact, Jen’ wanted me to use her real name in the book. She wanted it to be the truth. My dad was very positively struck by the book, which was a relief to me. I’ve found that most people are not taking it as a kiss-and-tell memoir. It’s more an anatomy of what makes me tick. As for the ghosts of bad behavior, Moody says: They’re still there. The historical legacy and genetic tendencies are there. But I know how to act today. And I’m not a drinker anymore. I’ve been clean for 15 years. And with that, Rick Moody’s own black veil has for now anyway been lifted. I’ve found that most people are not taking it as a kiss-and-tell memoir. It’s more an anatomy of what makes me tick. Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

As a child in an orphanage in the Soviet Union, Ruben Gallego dreamed of becoming a kamikaze. He knew he could never be a pilot, because cerebral palsy disabled his hands and feet, but he thought he might become a guided torpedo filled with explosives. I dreamed of stealing up to an enemy aircraft carrier very quietly and pressing the red button. Unable to walk, hidden away, Gallego dreamed of a useful death, because the only fate that seemed likely for him was a useless one. Instead, Gallego has triumphed over his disability and circumstances to write White on Black, a novelized memoir that is itself a kind of torpedo against mistreatment of the handicapped. In addition to his cerebral palsy, Gallego had the ill-luck to have a grandfather who cared more about politics than about his family. Ignacio Gallego, exiled secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s, saw to it that his infant grandson was shut away and told his daughter that the boy was dead. Little Ruben was left entirely to the mercies of a series of underfunded, badly run institutions. As he and the other severely disabled children became too old for orphanages, they were put in old-age homes, where most quickly died. Remarkably, in this collection of vignettes he calls collective images, Gallego focuses not on the horrors, but on what he calls the heroes the children and caretakers who were able to express their humanity despite the tremendous obstacles. In spare prose that underlines the tale’s universality, Gallego tells us of the tough, but warm peasant attendants, the mother of a friend who cut through the bureaucratic red tape to provide decent food, the child who smuggled out a letter asking for help.

Most of his caretakers assumed Ruben was stupid because he couldn’t walk. But Ruben had a sharp brain, and eventually he was able to make a living as a computer specialist, to find women who would love him and to reunite with his long-lost mother. There’s no need to die a useful death when you can live a useful life. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

The National Book Award-winning author of How We Die presents another poignant, intelligent narrative humanity’s remarkable ability to endure. Lost in America is a touching account of Nuland’s family history, and it focuses largely on the author’s father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish immigrant who arrived in America during the early part of the 20th century. Bringing the crowded tenements of New York City vividly to life, Nuland delivers an affectionate profile of the man, a displaced traveler who never quite feels at home in the midst of fast-paced American culture, and who demands a difficult sort of loyalty from his children. Over the course of the book, as he questions what it means to be a son, the author deftly blends history and autobiography into an unforgettable story. This is a wonderfully detailed retrospective and a profound exploration of the meaning of home and family.

A boy grows up to the age of eight in a central Pennsylvania town, never knowing anything beyond the world of family, church, school a human world, with purely human concerns. But when the family moves to a town near Long Island Sound, the boy wanders off into the Connecticut woods rising near his front door, into a thicket, then into a swamp. When he spots his first turtle, the jolt of wonder and recognition staggers him. Here, in this new world, “all the more miraculous for being real,” he knows he has come home at last.

David M. Carroll was that boy, and has remained that boy all through the years of his grown-up achievements as naturalist, artist and author. In this radiant memoir, he shares a lifetime of abiding passions for nature, art, teaching and a few kindred human souls. In the telling, Carroll magically collapses time into one ever-renewing turtle cycle of hibernation, nesting and hatching. Before encountering this book, anyone might naturally laugh with scorn at the notion that a walk into a wetland to look for turtles could be a thrilling thing to read about, fraught with anxiety and delight. Scorn turns to amazement, though, as Carroll takes hold of the reader as surely as he picks up one of his slow, spotted friends to examine its underside (called plastron, as we gratefully learn). “Eccentric” is a word often applied to someone like Carroll or his beloved literary mentor, Thoreau. The word simply means “off-center.” Self-Portrait with Turtles joins Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and a handful of other great books which reconfigure the center where it has always been, with the Earth herself and with her creatures. Human beings, even the most urban of us, rightly belong in that company, but in our mad haste, we have gone “eccentric,” away from our natural home. Carroll wants to bring us back. But it is hard, and it is late, for the natural world is already so terribly diminished by what we have wrought upon it in the name of progress. Like his three earlier books (The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections and Swampwalker’s Journal, together called the Wet Sneakers Trilogy), Carroll’s memoir is in part an elegy for what has been lost. Here is a man who loves people as much as he loves turtles it’s mankind he can’t stand.

Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.

No doubt about it: Allen Long inhaled. Running bales of high-quality marijuana from secret runways in Colombian jungles to the public university campuses of 1970s America, Long, the consummate hustler and riverboat gambler, lived the high life of a dope smuggler. He indulged nonstop, not only in the drugs he dealt, but also in wealth, women and toys.

In Loaded, author Robert Sabbag follows Long into the heart of the marijuana trade at a time when "smuggling aircraft were beginning to stack up over the Guajira [a coastal region in Colombia] like commercial flights over JFK." Sabbag, author of Snowblind an inside look at the cocaine trade recounts Long’s high-wire act in an exciting, page-turning adventure, complete with a cast of characters that few fiction writers could conjure. The brawny JD Reed has "arms the size of railroad ties, long brown hair, combed like that of a renegade cavalryman, and eyes as resolute as Manifest Destiny." When he wasn’t setting up portable runway lights in northeast California to help land planeloads of pot, Reed liked to tear big city phone books in half with his massive hands.

If only Long had stopped after the first half-dozen successful dope runs and bought some land or stock with his wealth. Instead, he scored and consumed cocaine by the ounce and invested $3.5 million in a final, winner-take-all marijuana buy. To move 60,000 pounds of Colombia’s Santa Marta Gold, Long and his partners employed a 170-foot ocean freighter, a DC-4 plane, a Sikorsky helicopter, a 5,000-gallon fuel truck and a few tractor-trailers. What happened next to Long is what eventually happens to all smugglers if they’re lucky.

Sabbag’s book is not an indictment of drug smuggling but rather an appealing behind-the-scenes look at a more innocent time in America’s infamous drug history. Crack wasn’t on the scene yet, nor were methamphetamine labs. The South American cartels hadn’t declared war on their own citizens, and all business was based on a post-1960s culture of a shared bong.

Still, whenever your work takes you to dimly lit warehouses, and the people you work with pay you with suitcases of cash or a bullet to the brain, it’s usually time to go straight.

Stephen J. Lyons writes from Monticello, Illinois.