<B>A son reclaims his father’s dream</B> Before he died, Dennis Covington’s father, who never earned more than $14,000 in a year, told him: "To my knowledge, no Covington has ever left anything to anybody. I don’t intend to be the first." Angered because he had been swindled in the purchase of a sight-unseen plot of worthless Florida land, he then willed the deed to Dennis. Dennis interpreted this departure from family custom as a challenge from the grave: to redeem his inheritance.

Some years later, Covington drove from his Alabama home to take a look at the two and one-half acre parcel. That trip led to a series of harrowing experiences he relates in <B>Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream</B>. Unlike other cheated landowners, Covington refused to yield his claim when he found himself encircled by an ornery subculture that endorses the mere notion of "he deserved it" as a justifiable reason for maiming or even slaying another person.

Covington defies gun-toting yahoos and squatters who, with the assent of compliant sheriff’s deputies, have denied access to the legal owners and taken over the land as their own. He is greeted by clear messages that he is unwelcome on his own property: his Jeep has been trashed, his crude cabin has been strafed with bullets and its canvas walls slashed, and, as the ultimate warning, a dead armadillo lies on its back in the middle of the floor. Covington, whose <I>Salvation on Sand Mountain</I> was a 1995 National Book Award finalist, excels as a storyteller. Although the pursuit of his father’s folly drives his new book, Covington is able to mix the retelling of his mission with happy thoughts about growing up with his family. He reminisces in such an appealing way that some readers probably will be prompted to put the book down for a few minutes and recall tender moments when their own parents counseled them. When a writer inspires a response like that, a reader can’t ask for much more. <I>Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.</I>

Two intriguing new books one by an outspoken African-American journalist and another by an equally candid civil rights activist offer starkly different views on race relations in America. The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and Quitting America by Randall Robinson explore the many ways in which African-Americans have been maligned, discriminated against and mistreated. However, Dickerson and Robinson disagree strongly on who or what is responsible for the plight of African Americans and what should be done to change it.

Dickerson, a former Air Force intelligence officer and a Harvard Law grad, is a journalist known for her bluntness, particularly on issues of race and gender. In a critically acclaimed memoir, An American Story (2000), she revealed her own circuitous route to success as a black woman and accepted responsibility for most of her personal and professional failings. In The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners, Dickerson argues that some African Americans are so mired in past wrongs done to them that they are unwilling and/or unable to move forward and work to improve their status. “Blacks simply do not know who and how to be absent oppression,” Dickerson writes in characteristically straightforward fashion. “To cease invoking racism and reveling in its continuance is to lose the power to haunt whites, the one tattered possession they’ll fight for while their true freedom molders unclaimed. It is to lose the power to define themselves as the opposite of something evil, rather than on their own terms.” For Dickerson, the solution is in self-reliance, with African Americans working to free themselves from what constrains and limits them, focusing on the future rather than the past. She urges African Americans to look inside in order to find the answers to problems on the outside, never defining themselves solely on the basis of race. As for the expected backlash her ideas will bring from fellow African Americans, Dickerson says she would welcome the opportunity to debate her critics.

Randall Robinson takes an equally caustic approach to espousing his views about race, but reaches a dramatically different conclusion. In Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land, Robinson explains why he lost hope and literally “quit” the U.S. Disgusted, aggravated and burnt out, Robinson left the country and relocated to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts where his wife was born.

For Robinson, the decision to leave was the culmination of years of resentment toward his treatment as a black man and civil rights advocate in America. Experiences such as being forced to sit at the back of the bus and being denied courteous service at a restaurant or department store contributed to his rage. He angrily tells stories about his protest marches, hunger strikes and political rallies through the years most of which were fruitless, his cries for change falling on deaf ears.

Robinson provides many sobering and grim statistics about injustice and inequality in America. “In a country that just squandered more than two hundred billion dollars on a war of dubious legality, forty-three million Americans sixteen percent of the population are without health care insurance,” he writes. “One in four blacks, including those who need health care insurance most, the poorest, are wholly unprotected.” Quitting America is a sharp contrast to Robinson’s 2002 book, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, in which he encourages African-Americans to speak out and support each other in eradicating crime and poverty from urban America. At this point, Robinson has simply given up on America and believes that the only way for people of color to thrive and succeed is to vacate this country for greener, or perhaps, blacker, and friendlier pastures elsewhere.

Glenn Townes is a journalist based in New Jersey.

This poignant memoir from Nafisi, a professor of literature who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, is sure to resonate with readers. A native of Iran, Nafisi left the country to attend university, then returned to become a teacher in Tehran. When she resigned from her school because of its repressive atmosphere, she formed a group with some of her best female students, and they began a secret study of Western literature. The meetings quickly became an outlet for political and personal debate, as the women shared stories of love, marriage and persecution under the Iranian government. Blending their personal anecdotes with wonderful evaluations of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others, Nafisi’s book is a fascinating portrait of the female experience in modern-day Iran and a testament to the redemptive power of literature a luxury most of us take for granted. A reading group guide is included in the book.

Though reading Between Two Worlds: Escaping from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam is a sometimes painful experience, this memoir of a daughter’s coming to terms with her parents’ decades-long high-wire act as unwilling members of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle is also the author’s hopeful vision, both for her own life and for the future of her native country.

Zainab Salbi was raised in a comfortable upper-middle-class Shi’a household in Baghdad. Her family’s liberal, westernized way of life, the norm among Iraqi elite, was rudely intruded upon by a leader who came to power just as Salbi’s childhood was coming to an end. Saddam Hussein, seemingly frustrated by his humble origins, attempted to worm his way into the upper echelons of Baghdadi society. Salbi recounts his influence on those he forcibly drew near him, and the terrible fate of those who dared to resist, giving us a unique glimpse inside his rule of terror. Salbi’s woes worsened once her father was tapped to be Saddam’s personal pilot, marking her for fear and resentment by the rest of Iraqi society as one of "Saddam’s friends." Not surprisingly, the threat of murder, imprisonment and deportation that hung over her parents’ heads slowly changed them from a fun-loving apolitical couple into a feuding husband and wife, torn between staying and leaving. Desperate to save her daughter, Salbi’s mother arranged for her daughter’s marriage to an Iraqi immigrant in the U.S., only to unwittingly land her in the arms of an abusive husband. Salbi’s story of her second escape, of the founding of the war victims’ charity Women for Women Inter-national, and of finally coming to terms with her parents’ own stories before her mother’s death, form a remarkable tale of emotional and mental resilience. Jehanne Moharram was born in the same year as Zainab Salbi, a few hundred miles south of Baghdad, in Kuwait. She now writes from Virginia.

In 1946, Paula Fox boarded a converted Liberty Ship and sailed to Europe, following a well-worn trajectory of young Americans seeking to find themselves. This 22-year-old’s journey took on an added layer of meaning, however, as she was heading toward a continent still in ruins after the war. The stories of what she found are told in The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe, the follow-up to her well-received first memoir, Borrowed Finery.

Fox, a writer with six novels and a Newbery Award-winning children’s book to her credit, maintains a sparse, steady tone throughout The Coldest Winter, whether writing about good times or painful memories. Her short chapters go by like scenery through the window of a moving train as she rapidly recounts experiences in Paris, London, Warsaw distilling each into remarkably acute images.

Before turning to Europe, she writes briefly of her life in New York, alternating between a world-weariness that belies her then-tender years, but not the life chronicled in Borrowed Finery ("For what seemed one hundred years, I paid rent to landlords"), and sheer delight at life in a city where she could happen upon the likes of Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday. As she puts it: "People, some of them now names on headstones, were walking around the city in the days of my youth, and you might run into them in all sorts of places. I met Duke Ellington on a flight of marble steps leading down from an exhibit by the painter Stuart Davis." Her meetings with ordinary people overseas are no less interesting. After listening to a Holocaust survivor during a tram ride through a frigid Prague night, she writes: "I was unable to take in the meaning of his story except suddenly, and then for only a few seconds at a time. When I did, it was as though I grasped broken glass in my hand." Yet, in spite of the devastation, despair and shock she encounters, Fox returns to the U.S. with a new sense of self. She has had the proverbial experience of an American abroad after all.

<B>Reporter’s notebook</B> Mike Wallace may not have interviewed <I>every</I> mover, shaker and cultural innovator of the past 60 years, but he’s come close. In <B>Between You and Me</B> his second autobiographical foray with co-author Gary Paul Gates the 87-year-old newsman revisits a few dozen of his more memorable on-camera encounters, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Yasir Arafat, the Shah of Iran, Tina Turner and Mel Brooks. In the course of his narration, he touches on some of the great issues of our time. Primarily, though, the book is as informal and chatty as its title.

From the start, Wallace moved among the mighty. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, he went to grade school with John F. Kennedy and attended college with playwright Arthur Miller. One of his close friends in 1940s Chicago when he worked in radio was actress Edie Davis, whose daughter Nancy would go on to marry Ronald Reagan. Wallace’s passion for engaging controversial figures, he explains, often got him into hot water. The two interviews that caused him the most grief were those with Gen. William Westmoreland, whom he had met and befriended early in the Vietnam War, and Jeffrey Wigand, the research chemist who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry. In the Westmoreland encounter, Wallace hosted a documentary that said the general had deliberately under-reported the number of enemy forces in Vietnam. Westmoreland sued CBS for libel. Although he eventually withdrew the suit, the rancor it generated plunged Wallace into a deep and near-suicidal depression.

The Wigand affair was a blow of a different sort. Fearing a crippling lawsuit from the tobacco companies just as the owners were trying to sell CBS, the network forbade "60 Minutes" from running the Wigand interview, although it did permit Wallace to voice his dissent against that decision. The quarrel put an end to Wallace’s longtime friendly relationship with "60 Minutes" producer Don Hewitt, who sided with the network. It also caused a rift with the segment’s producer, Lowell Bergman, who viewed Wallace as being too accommodating to the network.

Chuck Pfarrer feels no remorse for the men he has killed. “There are some people who need to go to hell and stay there,” he writes. In Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL, the former commando recalls lethal encounters in clandestine assaults against enemy forces throughout the world. His observation that “operations very seldom go as you think they will” was affirmed in Lebanon, where his unit was assigned to a purportedly safe mission as peacekeepers but instead found that “violence was the overwhelming reality.” He quickly abandoned atheism. Pfarrer gives shell-by-shell and grenade-by-grenade accounts of firefights in Beirut, where in a six-month tour of duty he and his men participated in more than 100 rescue and reconnaissance missions. He was only 500 yards from the terrorist explosion that killed 241 Marines in what arguably ranks as the most humiliating U.S. military loss since Pearl Harbor. He recollects the grim aftermath of the disaster, which Ronald Reagan in his autobiography termed the “greatest sorrow” of his presidency.

In detailing the training program of the SEALs (an acronym for Sea, Air, Land), Pfarrer says it is designed to flunk applicants so that only the toughest men mentally and physically can survive. One requirement: trainees must swim 400 yards, retrieve a face mask from the bottom with their teeth, and then tread water for 40 minutes all while their hands and feet are tied together with parachute cord. Especially absorbing is Pfarrer’s handling of Stan, a platoon member who was on the verge of freaking out and thus imperiling the safety of his buddies. In dealing with Stan, Pfarrer finds himself confronting his own fear. Pfarrer also discusses his marital infidelities and his bout with cancer, which ironically struck after he sensing he had “used up all of my luck” left the military. He became a prominent Hollywood screenwriter, with The Jackal, Hard Target and, not surprisingly, Navy SEALs among his credits. This book demonstrates that he writes just as well for the printed page as he does for the movies.

Last September, I was scheduled to appear on National Public Radio (NPR) to promote my new memoir, I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets, in a back-to-school-themed show. But minutes before airtime, the NPR producer told me that country music legend Johnny Cash had died and my segment had been bumped for an obituary.

Unlike Hillary Clinton or J.K. Rowling, I didn’t have marketing or PR machines to launch me into the media matrix. This was to be my big break the equivalent of an obscure comic landing on The Tonight Show and in a final act of one-upsmanship, Johnny Cash stole my microphone.

Cash’s swan song forced me to e-mail more than 200 people the embarrassing update of my un-appearance. My Amazon sales ranking marooned itself at 10,023, moving neither up nor down, a perfect symbol of my public-relations purgatory.

This spell of self-pity lasted for a month, until Willie Shoemaker, the famous jockey, died. I realized that somewhere, in a cramped and airless radio studio, another first-time author was getting booted to make time for a treacly homage by Bob Costas or some other yellow-jacketed pontificator.

Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. And every time a celebrity dies, a struggling author gets kicked back down into the shallow grave of obscurity. To see my life’s work pre-empted by the inconveniently timed deaths of the media-friendly had a terrible side effect: I stopped enjoying the obituaries.

In my 40s, I began to read the obituaries before the movie reviews the obits were more dramatic, revealing and instructive and now this simple pleasure had been ruined. When John Ritter died, instead of lingering over my teen memories of Three’s Company, I imagined hundreds of pasty-faced authors returning to their jobs at engineering magazines and Blockbuster stores, endless years of labor washed away so Rex Reed could prattle through six commercial breaks on Larry King.

Fall turned to winter and many fascinating people exited the world, stage left. I skimmed their obituaries with mounting irritation. By some small miracle (perhaps Willie Shoemaker rode to my rescue?), I was rebooked on NPR in early November. I prayed that any washed-up tennis pro or self-exiled Broadway composer who felt the need to shuffle off this mortal coil would exercise the common decency to yield until I was on the air. Frankly, though, I remained anxious. Celebrities dedicated their lives to hogging the spotlight. Why should they be any more charitable in death? As it turned out, terrorists bombed a Saudi Arabian compound the night before my appearance, bumping me again. The NPR producer rebooked me for Monday, one week before Thanksgiving. “Providing Saddam Hussein isn’t killed,” I joked. The producer laughed uncomfortably at my bizarre bad luck.

I spent 20 years as a reporter and knew that the news was inherently unpredictable. As a self-absorbed writer, I also wondered if I was having some cosmological influence. What if my potential celebrity was like a pebble dropped into the pond of Fate, and I was seeing the ripples of my existential impact? Even as an example of negative megalomania, the possibility that God might rearrange world events to crush my success was a powerfully seductive idea. Maybe I could hire myself out to Fox News or CNN to create crises during slow news cycles. The book-writing was not paying my bills.

That weekend, I scanned the news hourly. I could literally feel the gravity of my bad karma pushing and pulling the news two helicopters downed in Iraq, bombings in Istanbul, anti-Bush protests in England. And then billionaire Larry Tisch died. His empire was built on real estate and media -an irresistible portfolio for media tastemakers. I was toast. And yet, on Monday, the NPR producer said Tisch’s death would only carve 10 minutes out of my 60-minute spot. Unless Saddam Hussein was killed in the next few hours, I was green-lighted. I rode the train into New York City and walked to the NPR studio in total silence, hoping that no news was, finally, good news. Bruce Stockler is a humorist and the author of I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets.

<B>A mother’s balancing act</B> Toward the end of writing <B>Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life</B>, a process that took three years, my deadline got unexpectedly moved up. It became clear that I would have to drop everything in order to finish on time. I couldn’t stop my job teaching writing to Duke students because it was mid-semester, and I needed the paycheck. But I figured I could pretty much take a hiatus from everything else for two months. My back was against the wall, and my husband, an utterly generous man, agreed to take over the lion’s share of housework and childcare for our two sons, ages five and eight.

Up until that point, I’d written the way most writers do: stealing time from job, family and sleep in order to write. My book, in fact, is about precisely these negotiations and hard calls. It features a woman my narrative self who is ambitious in several conflicting arenas that all take time and can’t easily be multi-tasked. In order to finish this book, I would have to temporarily live a different life. Lucky for me, Duke’s spring break fell during the two months when I needed it most. My students were headed to Fort Lauderdale to sunbathe, drink margaritas and have bad sexual encounters. (I knew these details from the short stories they wrote each semester when they came back.) I had different plans, though I was going to a writers’ retreat.

At the retreat, I worked incredibly hard: 12 to 15 hours a day. Still, I had a lovely room with a gorgeous garden view. I got to make my own tea exactly when I wanted it. If I took a walk behind the ex-mansion that housed the retreat, I often saw people riding horses. When I got back, kind friends empathized. <I>You must be exhausted. Are you working all the time? Are you sleeping? Don’t worry, it will be over soon, and then you can relax.</I> Should I tell them the truth that writing 15 hours a day was way easier than my regular life? Should I tell them about the horses? Of course I should.

"Actually," I said, "I’m doing really well. It’s Duncan who’s bearing the brunt of things." Quite frankly, my husband Duncan looked like hell when I returned. I hated to see him so ragged. His face reminded me of the faces of mothers I saw in the park when my children were babies and toddlers: pinched, exhausted, always checking their watches <I>how much longer will this day go on?</I> I couldn’t see my own face at the time, but I knew it looked the same. While I was gone for 12 days, Duncan did what millions of women do each day as routine: work a job and single-handedly run a household with young kids. It was hard work, much of it invisible to the larger world.

<I>Dispatches</I> actually features a chapter in which I detail my anger at Duncan for not doing what I perceived to be enough domestic work prior to 2000. He left it to me, I felt, without seeing all that was there. Yet here he was, three years later, doing everything so I could finish this same book. That irony didn’t escape me or Duncan.

I wrote <I>Dispatches</I> because most of the women I know are exhausted, and whether or not they have husbands, they’re doing the large majority of work at home. And yet they feel guilty for not doing enough. I wanted to give voice to this exhaustion and guilt in the hope that my readers might recognize themselves and feel entitled to a small break.

My own break the only one I felt justified in taking happened because Random House pushed my deadline forward. Not to imply that writing a book, even with a lovely view, is easy. In my experience, writing is always hard work. That’s what I teach my students; it’s what I know to be true myself. Still, I told my sister that I allowed myself to do things at the retreat I never did in normal life: take long baths instead of lickety-split showers, eat whenever I was hungry, do yoga stretches at night. "I want you to be able to do those things for yourself without a book deadline," she replied.

"That’s what I want for every woman," I said.

How do we get there? Because I’m a writer, I have to say that the first step involves telling the truth about what our lives actually look like. I was fortunate enough to temporarily leave my regular life in order to reflect on it, briefly, from a more peaceful point of view. <I>Faulkner Fox is the author of </I>Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life: Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child. <I>For more information, visit www.faulknerfox.com.</I>