Like its author Vernon Jordan, the former civil rights leader turned capable businessman and lawyer, the memoir Vernon Can Read! is candid, worldly, controversial and distinctively smart. Co-written with Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the popular biography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, the book examines the life of Jordan from his youth in an Atlanta housing project through his glory years as head of one of the most enduring civil rights organizations, the National Urban League.

In a surprising admission, Jordan dismisses the much-publicized accounts of his rags-to-riches life as a fabrication of the media, noting that he "was never in rags." A voracious reader, he attended DePauw University and Howard University’s Law School. While Jordan’s account of his salad days in college and his early years as a lawyer are poignant, the book really picks up steam during his recollections of historic civil rights campaigns, during which he served as a member of the legal team that desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961.

In bold terms, Jordan discusses the emotional and legal obstacles of life under Jim Crow, and the importance of church and spirituality in his survival as a black man. As an observer of the times, he does more than just drop names; his insights reveal much about key figures of the 1960s and ’70s like Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Jesse Jackson and Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Carter. Jordan’s account of the 1980 assassination attempt that left him close to death is gripping and dramatic. He ends the book in that decade with a promise to continue in a future volume.

For all of his achievements, there is a modesty about Jordan, who often seems astonished by the demands and quirks of public life. "One of the strangest parts of being in the public eye is that people who don’t know you believe they know you," he writes. Vernon Can Read! may not answer all of the many questions the public has about President Clinton’s "First Friend," but the book goes a long way toward illuminating his essence and character. This is a marvelous memoir by a man who knows what to tell and how to tell it.

Robert Fleming, author of The African American Writers Handbook, writes from New York City.

Are your jingle bells already jangled? Has “Bah, humbug!” already crossed your lips? Relax. A little hot cocoa, a quiet corner and a merry book will turn your Grinchy grin into a ’tis-the-season smile. We’ve checked out a stocking full of new Christmas releases and selected a few of the best to brighten your spirits.

If the hectic pace of the modern holiday season gets you down, Bob Artley’s Christmas on the Farm will transport you back to a simpler place and time. Growing up on an Iowa farm in the 1920s, Artley lived without electricity or indoor plumbing, but the smell of mincemeat pie baking in the big black cookstove and the happy music of sleigh bells brought warmth and cheer to his young heart. This engaging childhood reminiscence comes alive through Artley’s numerous watercolor illustrations. From gathering wood and hauling water to the pastoral quiet of a “silent night” scene, his work depicts both the hardships of rural life and its awe-inspiring humble beauty. Despite the onslaught of chores and the biting cold of Iowa winters, Artley looks back with joy and gratitude for Christmases full of handmade gifts, a fresh-cut tree strung with popcorn and the closeness of family and friends.

Linda Stankard admits to making her own mincemeat one jangled Christmas.

This month’s new paperback releases include several excellent titles in fiction and nonfiction. We recommend the following selections as good choices for reading groups.

Honky By Dalton Conley This wise, timely memoir is an account of the author’s childhood in a predominantly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Manhattan. Conley, whose bohemian parents traded their well-heeled lives for an artsy inner city existence, was one of the few white boys in the projects, a place ruled by race and class where violence was close at hand a world where whites, for once, were the minority. Richly evocative of 1960s and ’70s New York, filled with unforgettable incidents and characters from the author’s childhood, including his offbeat parents, Honky is an unusually insightful memoir. Conley, now a professor of sociology at New York University, offers a unique perspective on ethnicity and class. A reading group guide is available at www.vintagebooks.com/read. Lying Awake By Mark Salzman Salzman’s best-selling novel is the story of Sister John, a middle-aged nun who lives in a Carmelite monastery in Los Angeles. Intense, recurring visions of God are a source of spiritual fulfillment for Sister John, but they come with a price, arriving with electrifying headaches that force her to seek medical attention. When her doctor hints that illness may be the cause of her gift, Sister John must make a choice: cure the headaches and perhaps lose her special connection to the spiritual world, or carry on with the visions, knowing they may not be real. A brief novel that tackles weighty themes, Salzman’s latest is small and exquisite, a convincing portrayal of a society rarely seen. A reading group guide is available at www.vintagebooks.com/read. The Sheep Queen By Thomas Savage Back Bay is thankfully re-issuing this western epic, a family saga set in Idaho that was originally published in 1977. Emma Sweringen, known as the Sheep Queen of Idaho, is at the center of this taut, expertly crafted novel. As matriarch of the Sweringens a sheep-ranching clan she contends with the politics of family life: a worshipful son, a disappointing daughter and a granddaughter, long ago given up for adoption, who spends years making her way back to the family. When she finally finds the Sweringens, she changes their lives forever. Savage, a woefully overlooked writer who made the West his narrative territory, is the author of 10 novels and a Guggenheim Fellow. A reading group guide is included in the book. The Heartsong of Charging Elk By James Welch Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux and member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, travels with the troupe to Marseille, France, where after an injury he is left behind in a hospital. As the show travels on without him, he must make a life for himself in a strange land. Unable to speak French or English, Charging Elk adapts as best he can, eventually falling in love, but memories of life on the Plains are ever-present, and a sense of isolation haunts him. Loosely based on true events, the novel is a skillful re-imagining of history. Welch who is of Blackfoot-Gros Ventre descent gives new dimension to the American Indian experience in this beautifully executed, award-winning book. A reading group guide is available online at www.anchorbooks.com. Crooked River Burning By Mark Winegardner Winegardner’s second novel is as much about place as it is about people. Cleveland, Ohio, is the setting for this work of historical fiction that traces the life of the city and two of its inhabitants throughout the 1950s and ’60s. A pair of ill-fated teenage lovers from different sides of the tracks, David Zelinsky, who was raised on Cleveland’s blue-collar West Side, and Anne O’Connor, the daughter of a wealthy political boss, fall in love, and their romance has unforgettable repercussions. Although David marries another woman and Anne makes a career for herself in TV news, their relationship spans 20 tumultuous years, during which history works its changes upon the city. Blending fact and fiction ˆ la E. L. Doctorow, the author brings real-life figures like Elliot Ness and Satchel Paige into the novel, making this a many-layered portrait of a more innocent America. A reading group guide is included in the book.

There have been enough Vietnam memoirs, and memoirs thinly disguised as novels, to fill dozens of library shelves. Some, such as those by Michael Herr, Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo, have become modern classics of war (or anti-war) literature. Though perhaps not destined for such enduring status, Tracy Kidder’s convincing <b>My Detachment</b> offers an often brutally candid portrait of one young man who, even as he left for Vietnam, was not quite sure why he went.

Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for <i>The Soul of a New Machine</i>, a penetrating study of the computer industry that presaged our microchip-driven world. He has applied the same mode of anthropological journalism to such subjects as education and the building of a house. So it is interesting to see how this perceptive writer, for whom the devil is always found in the details, dissects his own experience.

Fresh out of Harvard, Kidder joined the Army for reasons he still seems somewhat unsure about. It was neither the expected nor the popular thing for someone of his class and education to do. The expression baby killer had recently entered the lexicon, flung at men in uniform by protestors on college campuses across the country, including Harvard, and Kidder’s liberal friends were dumbfounded by his decision. Rudderless and unhappy in love, the disconsolate young Kidder figured he might be drafted anyway, and as an officer with his elite education, he was thinking he would land a cushy desk job at Arlington Hall.

Signing on for intelligence work, Kidder endured basic training, then Army Security Agency school in Massachusetts, which allowed him to spend schizophrenic weekends in Cambridge among his old anti-war crowd. Then it was off to Vietnam, where, with nary a moment’s training on how to command, he was put in charge of a small band of intractable enlisted men. Those who still believe that the picture of the Army painted in <i>Catch-22</i> was fiction need read no further than Kidder’s unadorned account for proof that absurdity is a fact of life in the wartime military.

Yet while there is humor to be found between the lines and in some of the Kafkaesque situations, <b>My Detachment</b> largely captures the gloom and futility that the young soldier found far from home. He romanticizes his humdrum days in letters he never sends, imagining himself taking a pair of young Vietnamese boys under his wing, or telling of a non-existent girlfriend in a nearby village. In fits of rage directed at the girl he left behind, who is slowly breaking up with him by letter, he writes about killing men in battles never fought. In fact, Kidder never saw combat, which is both a source of relief and of disappointment. I think it might have sufficed if I’d been an infantry platoon leader, he writes. As it was, I felt, increasingly, that everything I did was worse than pointless. And still, perversely, I wanted the war, with all else it had to do, to lend my life some meaning. As an officer among enlisted men, young Kidder wants desperately to be liked, a touchy scenario when your charges are all too happy to run roughshod over you. While he establishes a certain rapport with his sergeant, it takes time for him to win the uneasy trust of his men. Still, you get the sense that Kidder, despite his background, is more comfortable with these guys than with his fellow officers, especially the lifers who take it all so very seriously. Mostly, though, one gets the sense that he is marking off the days on his calendar until he can leave.

<b>My Detachment</b> has no blood-splattered violence or foreboding sense of menace (though Kidder does include excerpts from an overwrought, unpublished war novel that he wrote after his tour of duty, which points up the marked differences between reality and the fiction writer’s imagination). The menace here is in Lieutenant Kidder’s muddled head. The double-edged title of this probing book expresses the state of mind of a young man eager to do what is right, what he was trained for, but in a climate less conducive than he had imagined. At a time when our military is once more engaged in a controversial war, Kidder’s brooding ruminations lead one to wonder what some of today’s soldiers might be thinking and ponder what books they might write 40 years from now. <i>Robert Weibezahl is the author of the novel</i> The Wicked and the Dead.

<b>A (former) nun’s story</b> In the preface to her memoir, <b>The Tulip and the Pope</b>, novelist Deborah Larsen (<i>The White</i>) confesses that her recall of five years spent as a young Roman Catholic nun was like envisioning a string of paper lanterns . . . lit spottily against the dark along a dock, where some days, even now, waves dash. This revelation forecasts the narrative to come, one that movingly and honestly explores an innocent girl’s faith and subsequent coming-of-age in well-crafted, evocative prose.

It is July 1960, in Dubuque, Iowa, and 19-year-old Larsen and two friends sit in a taxicab outside the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They are nervously smoking their last cigarettes, on the edge of a new life, and are, says Larsen, blithe to become nuns. Young Deborah, simply, loved God, and was inspired by Belgian nurse Sister Luke in <i>The Nun’s Story</i>. She desired to do good, and felt that being heroic, changing the world, was much better than being married and getting out the Electrolux. Short, quirkily titled chapters ( Hair and the Habit, Joan of Arc’s Kneecaps ) reveal Larsen’s conformed life, of both body and mind, behind the convent doors a life navigated with eyes continually downcast, as dictated by a meditative rule called custody of the eyes. This view into a nun’s sequestered world is intriguing, often amusing, but it is Larsen’s rigorously truthful and self-questioning chronicle of her journey of faith that holds the reader in thrall. The story is told with the wisdom of 40 years’ hindsight, and the author achieves an admirable blend in her narrative voice: she ably recaptures her youthful naivete, as well the growing doubt that leads her back to a secular life.

The book’s unusual title refers to a spiritual epiphany Larsen had as a child while observing a tulip in the family garden. The lovely meditation on this experience, and how it brought her closer to God, makes this an especially redeeming read. <i>Alison Hood is a writer based in San Rafael, California.</i>

Tony Hillerman has delighted a generation of mystery readers with books that offer not only the usual crime fiction thrills but also enlightening glimpses of the Navajo people and their culture. With the publication this month of his memoir, Seldom Disappointed, this great storyteller proves that his own life story is one well worth telling. Self-effacing, unflappable and eminently likeable, Hillerman has the same qualities as the Navajo heroes in his mysteries Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee. Starting with The Blessing Way in 1970, the Navajo series has grown in popularity through the years, with 14 entries, including the most recent bestseller, Hunting Badger (1999).

An Oklahoma native, Hillerman traces his interest in Native Americans to the years he attended an Indian school in his hometown of Sacred Heart. He left Oklahoma as a teenager to serve in a rifle company during World War II, and his account of infantry action in Europe rivals any in The Greatest Generation. His service ended when he stepped on a mine and landed in an Army hospital in a full body cast. After his recovery, Hillerman went on to a career as a newspaper reporter and journalism professor, not turning to fiction until he was well into his 40s.

The title of the book comes from a piece of advice Hillerman’s beloved mother offered her young son: Blessed are those who expect little. They are seldom disappointed. Taking the advice to heart, Hillerman holds no grudges against those who have done him wrong, even the literary agent who suggested he get rid of the Indian stuff if he ever hoped to get a mystery novel published.

It’s tempting to cast Homer Hickam as a rags-to-riches, self-made man. The son of a coal mine supervisor, he was raised in a rural West Virginia town with limited access to public education’s most up-to-date resources. When, as a child, he experimented with designing and launching rockets (well before man had walked on the moon), he went up against the traditions of a community that had little use for original behavior. Inauspicious beginnings perhaps, but as an adult, Homer Hickam became an engineer for NASA and a best-selling writer.

So it would have been easy for him to paint himself as an undiscovered diamond in an unforgiving coal town. But that’s not the tenor of Sky of Stone, in which Hickam re-creates the events of a long-ago summer spent in his hometown of Coalwood following his freshman year in college.

Sky of Stone is a follow-up to Hickam’s two previous memoirs, Rocket Boys (which was made into the movie October Sky) and The Coalwood Way. In all three books, the author commemorates his hometown and its citizens with loving admiration. Homer’s parents, though imperfect, are remembered for their humor, dedication and ingenuity. The author gives them full credit for insisting that he go to college and pursue his dreams.

More surprisingly, Hickam portrays Coalwood not as a soul- and lung-destroying wasteland, but as the embodiment of the American dream. Coalwood’s fine schools, decent houses and well-nourished families are sustained by the production of coal. That’s what the town’s mining families believed, and Hickam honors their strong sense of self-determination.

The dark side to the coal industry black lung, union quarrels, unequal opportunity for women rears its head in Hickam’s reminiscences, as they did in Coalwood in 1961. But they are not the subject of Sky of Stone. Hickam focuses on three young people Bobby Likens, Rita Walicki and himself for whom Coalwood’s resistance to change acted as a bracing stimulant, calling forth all of the trio’s shrewdness and creativity. They were made by Coalwood, not in spite of it.

The book’s various plot strands the estrangement of Hickam’s parents; the charges brought against his father involving the death of a mining foreman occasionally seem unconnected. But the author brings them all together in a final courtroom drama. Hickam’s skill with plot, his wit and his capacity for summing up a character in a couple of good quotes all make Sky of Stone an admirable entry in the chronicles of his life.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

, John Edgar Wideman’s new memoir about the aesthetics of basketball, may be one of the best books ever written about the sport, as deft and breathlessly poetic as a Michael Jordan fadeaway jumper. The first chapter of the book is titled More, appropriate because Hoop Roots is about much more than the game. This is the 59-year-old Wideman’s look at a lifetime of playing basketball on the playground, in high school, in college and for a few years in Europe. In a sense, this memoir, like the author’s previous Brothers and Keepers (about his brother’s imprisonment for life on robbery and murder charges) and Fatheralong (about his son’s conviction for murder), is also about the search for a father and the loss of so many black men to violence and racism. Writing this memoir was clearly a way for Wideman to explain to himself and to others why the game is so important. It may also have been a way for him to make sense of the loss of his brother and son and the unraveling of his marriage of 30-plus years. Hoop Roots is his way of holding on . . . starting a story so that a story can end. Although Wideman sees professional basketball as a form of blackface minstrelsy, he sees the playground game as one generated by desire: The desire to play. In this sense also it’s truly a player’s game. It exists nowhere except where and when the players’ minds and bodies construct it. . . . The game’s pure because it’s a product of the players’ will and imagination. If the players’ desire cools, there is no game. Or at best some sloppy substitute of game not worth bothering with. Wideman is at his best in this book, as smart and lyrical as anyone who has written on the game in the past three decades. Applying his finely textured prose style to the sport, he has written a book that creates shock waves of recognition. When he brings race and family and politics to bear on the subject, he writes with a brisk persuasiveness. Playground hoop, like all cultural practices at the margins, engages in a constant struggle to reinvent itself, pump out new vibrations, new media and messages of yea-saying, saying loudly, clearly, Yes. We’re here, still here, and we’re human, we’re beautiful. So too is Wideman’s memoir.

Michael Pearson directs the creative writing program at Old Dominion University.

Don’t be surprised if you finish Susanna Kaysen’s intriguing memoir, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, in one sitting. Not only is it a small book only 176 pages but it is a startlingly intimate look at the limits of medicine and the role of sexuality in our identity.

Kaysen made headlines with her previous memoir, Girl, Interrupted, the 1993 bestseller that chronicled her two-year stay in a mental institution. Her first book provided candid details about the parallel universe of mental illness, and in Camera, Kaysen again toys with societal taboos by describing the medical ordeal she endured when something went wrong with her vagina.

With terse writing and a wry sense of humor, Kaysen describes a months-long litany of doctor visits as she tries to find a cure for her constant vaginal pain. Her ailment, which she likens to a little dentist drilling a little hole, stumps a host of specialists. They prescribe a variety of treatments, from vinegar rinses to tea baths, from biofeedback to antidepressants, all to no avail. Kaysen may be short on some details, omissions that leave the reader feeling a bit adrift (Where does she live? What does she do for a living?), but readers will be drawn in by her ingenuous confessions. She’s brutally honest about her relationship with her unnamed live-in boyfriend. Now that I didn’t want to have sex, though, we got into trouble, she writes. Their relationship deteriorates into constant fighting and even violence as his forced abstinence causes major friction.

Kaysen doesn’t drift into explicit or intentionally shocking territory; she remains witty and plainspoken throughout the whole medical ordeal. Girl, Interrupted dared to bring the question, What is crazy? into the open, and Camera is sure to make waves with the provocative issues it raises. What does it mean for a woman when she no longer feels desire?  "Sex really is the basis of everything . . . when eros goes away, life gets dull,"  Kaysen writes. And what can you do when medical science can’t find a cure?

Kaysen, 52, is already being criticized for taking autobiography to a new level of exposure with her personal confessions. But this intimate investigation explores bigger issues like doctor-patient relationships and sex versus love. Her account is sure to fascinate readers and keep them blushing as well.

David Brinkley once said TV journalists simply find out what’s happening and tell what they’ve seen. In his fourth book, completed shortly before his death in June, Brinkley does more: he also tells us what he was thinking. Brinkley’s Beat: People, Places and Events That Shaped My Time, eschews any chronological inclination and, in grab-bag style, shares observations and opinions on headline-makers and events that fascinated Brinkley during his 50-year career in broadcasting.

Brinkley pulls no punches in discussing newsmakers who intrigued him, such as Jimmy Hoffa, Joe McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. First on his list is Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, who, claiming to be the "best friend the Negro has got," bragged about introducing legislation to settle U.S. blacks in Africa. Among the 11 presidents he knew, Brinkley viewed President Clinton as "maybe the most dazzling political talent of my lifetime." He says the whole Clinton/Lewinsky scandal including Clinton’s behavior, the sensational press coverage and the "vindictiveness" of prosecutors and congressional bigwigs "made me sick." Brinkley applies the description of "most impressive and, in some ways, the most appalling" to President Johnson, who snubbed Brinkley and ordered his phones tapped after the commentator said U.S. involvement in Vietnam was pointless.

Brinkley covered 24 national political conventions, drawing particular admiration for sustaining viewers’ interest during boring periods with clever ad-libbing. He now attributes this performance to intensive staff research on every person and issue that figured to come before the delegates. He vividly recounts how television handled President Kennedy’s assassination, while a frightened nation prayed for assurance that the event was not part of a wide conspiracy. In those hours and days, television came of age with what Brinkley calls "the most useful single service in television’s history." Brinkley’s Beat is a readable and revealing account, just what we would expect from an insider who made a huge difference in television’s serious side. Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

“I can not live without books,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote. Avid readers Sara Nelson, Nancy Pearl and Michael Dirda happily share the celebrated statesman’s sentiment. From tales of childhood to thoughts on Tolstoy and Twain, a trio of new books by these literature lovers reflects the perks and quirks of their page-turning obsession. Recreation for some, therapy for others, books can enrapture, enrage, envelop and amaze as these talented authors demonstrate. “Books get to me personally,” says New York Observer publishing columnist and self-proclaimed readaholic Sara Nelson. “When things go right, I read. When things go wrong, I read more.” In her new book, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (Putnam, $22.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0399150838), Nelson takes the reader along for a year’s worth of literature and life, offering funny, wise commentary on the ways in which the two intersect. Nelson, who had originally intended to select 52 books for 52 weeks of reading, says her plan fell apart almost immediately. “In reading, as in life, even if you know what you’re doing, you really kind of don’t,” she says. In week one, she set out to read Ted Heller’s Funnymen, a book about stand-up comics, while staying in a Vermont home once owned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But Heller’s gags didn’t play well in the snowy, somber setting, says Nelson. From that point forward, she says, books seemed to choose her as much as she chose them. So Many Books, So Little Time is jam-packed with memorable moments, including the unlikely writing lessons gleaned from culinary bad boy and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Perhaps most memorable of all are Nelson’s musings on a reader’s right to stop reading a book he or she doesn’t like: “It’s the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion,” says the author. “The moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.'” For the record: Nelson now allows herself to toss disappointing tomes at page 20 or 200.

For many, reading is escapism. For writer and Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, books were nothing short of salvation. Raised in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Detroit, Pearl says her family defined dysfunction long before the label came to be. “All I knew then was that I was deeply and fatally unhappy,” says Pearl, author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason (Sasquatch, $16.95, 304 pages, ISBN 1570613818). During childhood and early adolescence, Pearl sought refuge at the Parkman Branch Library, where friendly librarians introduced her to books resonating with realities far brighter than her own. “It is not too much an exaggeration if it’s one at all to say that reading saved my life,” she says. Providing recommendations and revelations for more than 100 categories of books, from “Road Novels” and “Russian Heavies” to “Fabulous First Lines” and “Food for Thought,” Pearl’s approach is direct. The author of several professional books for librarians, including Now Read This, she highlights some of her favorite scribes in the category “Too Good to Miss,” offering an eclectic assortment of authors, including Robert Heinlein and Jonathan Lethem. With its short, snappy chapters, Book Lust is a must for any serious reader’s bedside table, a literary nightcap sure to prompt sweet dreams. “All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book,” lamented steelworker Eugene Dirda about his son Michael, a shy, bespectacled boy who preferred the pages of Thoreau to dating or sports. From humble beginnings in the Ohio rust belt town of Lorain to a top post at one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, Dirda’s world has always percolated with words. Both witty and wistful, An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland pays homage to a bookish youth spent in small-town America. Woven throughout the text are references to books and authors who inspired, intrigued and rankled Dirda, who is now Senior Editor for The Washington Post Book World.

Dirda gives a grateful nod to the educators and friends who influenced him in his early adult years. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist also makes peace with the man he considered impossible to please: “I forgave my father everything: He could be overbearing and worse, but his soul-deadening labor gave me the time to read and to know that my life would be privileged compared to his.” Books, it seems, can also offer redemption. Allison Block writes from La Jolla, California.