<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>

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.