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.

<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.