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.

Navajo poet Nasdijj has produced another triumph in his latest memoir, Geronimo’s Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me. Although the writer’s earlier works centered on his adopted children, in this new book Nasdijj explores his own abusive past and that of his brother, Tso. There’s no polite way to put this: Nasdijj and his brother were repeatedly raped and beaten by their father over a period of several years after their mother died. Nasdijj frequently emerged from these confrontations with broken bones that, he indicates, are to blame for a painful bone disease that threatens his life now that he is in his 50s. This cycle of abuse took place within the context of poverty, hunger and instability. A migrant worker, Nasdijj’s father moves his family every few weeks. A chronic alcoholic, he rarely gets around to shopping for food or cooking for his boys. Other migrants are too scared to report the abuse to the authorities. And the arm of the law isn’t long enough, apparently, to catch up with a migrant child molester.

Geronimo’s Bones is loosely woven around the brothers’ daring escape from their father. At ages 13 and 14, they pick their father’s pocket of several thousand dollars, steal a Corvette from a chop shop and drive it to California. One of their first stops is a House of Pancakes where they pick up a 16-year-old girl who is also running away from home. Her driver’s license facilitates their journey since she can legally drive and can check them into motels along the way. Their journey is not told in a straight line, however. Nasdijj deliberately fragments his story, going back and forth in time, slipping years ahead without warning. By organizing his story this way, he mimics the way the human mind deals with harsh memories in pieces that string together in random patterns.

“What pisses me off about the assumption that my life, and the life of my brother, can be explained in linear ways, is, too, an assumption that my father was destroyed in degrees,” explains Nasdijj. He goes on to write, “our father was destroyed in a thousand ways, a trillion ways, ways far beyond our limited ability to understand even as it was happening in front of our eyes. Even as it was happening to him, it was happening to us.” Nasdijj interweaves his narrative with Native American mythology, especially the myths surrounding Indian leader Geronimo. The author reinvents himself and his brother as mythological “war twins,” sons of Changing Woman, sister to White Shell Woman. Each new chapter of his narrative begins with myth, then gears back into the story of his own horrible childhood. In Geronimo’s Bones, Nasdijj casts a light on the psychology of abusive parents and children who are so disempowered they don’t appeal for help. Some people may find themselves drawn to this book for the lessons it offers psychologists and social workers. Others will be drawn to Nasdijj’s haunting poetic style. Whether for its sociological values or for its literary merit, most readers are bound to find Geronimo’s Bones a groundbreaking and important new work. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

It is difficult to imagine a more thorough immersion into the world of everyday copdom—with all its sudden excitements and excruciating procedural minutiae—than readers will find in Blue Blood. Of course, this isn’t just any cop who’s writing the script and painting the scenery. Edward Conlon is a Harvard-educated police detective who first drew attention to his Job (he always capitalizes that word) with his "Cop’s Diary" in The New Yorker, which he wrote under the pseudonym Marcus Laffey. And it isn’t just any police department he works for—it’s the New York Police Department, where a local clash can mushroom into world news overnight. Remember Abner Louima and the toilet plunger or the 41 bullets expended on Amadou Diallo?

Conlon, who was born in the Bronx, had cops in the family (including a larcenous great-grandfather and a flashy uncle) and an FBI agent for a father. He joined the NYPD in 1995 and soon found immense satisfaction in walking his tough beat, where humanity came in every emotional shade and degree of cunning. He developed an almost scientific detachment in gauging the effects his presence made on these people’s lives. But for every stimulation of the street, every small victory, there was the corollary boredom of filing reports and dealing with self-serving superiors.

Neither power-hungry nor bleeding-heart, Conlon lets his observations lead him where they will. Looking around the poor neighborhood he patrols, he notes, "You saw what happened when people got used to not paying for things: though the hospital was a block away, people called for ambulances constantly when they had 99-degree temperatures or mild diarrhea; or worse, they claimed to have chest pains or difficulty breathing because they needed prescription refills, and didn’t want to walk to the pharmacy or wait in line."

Conlon presents an array of colorful characters—resourceful cops, wily informants and elusive drug dealers—not so much for the color itself as to illustrate the tapestry of personalities a cop has to deal with. "[T]he NYPD," he notes, "offered entry into a drama as rich as Shakespeare. And I didn’t want to hear the story as much as I wanted to tell it, and I didn’t want to tell the story as much as I wanted to join it." When it comes time for his partners to give him a nickname, they settle on "Poe," which Conlon finds satisfying since Poe once lived in the Bronx and "wrote the first mystery story ever."

From the vantage points of time and his insider status, Conlon retells the stories of NYPD alums Eddie "Popeye" Egan and Sonny Grosso of The French Connection fame and Frank Serpico, whose last name would become synonymous with police probity. Conlon has no patience for those who use cops for their own political advantage, whether it’s Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton seeking gains by crying racism or former mayors John Lindsay and David Dinkins undermining cops to show their "evenhandedness." And while he laments what the cops did to Louima and Diallo, Conlon is contemptuous of the media’s rush to judgment and the politicians’ cynical exploitation of the incidents.

These 500-plus pages sometimes run heavy with abbreviation, jargon and elliptical references; and Conlon is far more open with his head than his heart. Still, he admits us into a fascinating and frightening world that is never far from our own doorstep.

  Edward Morris lives and works in Nashville.

<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.