Today’s literary marketplace is awash in memoir. And, while the writing of many tell-all tomes might engender positive therapeutic experiences for their authors, readers often do not fare as well. This, though, is not the fate for readers of Rose Castillo Guilbault’s charming memoir, The Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America. From its evocative opening I see the desert, vast and expansive . . . Saguaros stand still and idle . . . guarding their domain of sand and heat, where nothing moves faster than the measured slither of a snake to the last heartfelt phrase, Guilbault is gentle, but honest, giving us unaffected, direct prose about a Sonoran girl’s formative years in a small California community with her farmworker family.

Guilbault came to America at age five with her divorced mother and eventually became a journalist, growing this memoir from a column, Hispanic USA, that she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in the early ’90s. Twenty-seven essays, each almost a stand-alone story, lead chronologically through Guilbault’s life in the Salinas Valley, and touch upon the seminal people, places, objects and events that shaped her inner and outer worlds.

If you were young and Mexican it was understood you would work in the fields. . . . My first time was when I was eleven, she writes in one of the many unequivocal statements that reveal the grueling work lives, poverty and cultural prejudices endured by California’s emigrant and migrant Mexican farm communities. Inspiring and insightful, Guilbault’s narrative shines a necessary light on a darker aspect of life in a western paradise.

“For me, an expedition is a work of art expressed on a canvas of snow, air and time,” says Liv Arnesen, who in 2001 became one of the first women to cross the landmass of Antarctica on foot. In temperatures as cold as 35 degrees below zero, the Norwegian Arnesen, along with Minnesota native Ann Bancroft, walked, skied and ice-sailed for nearly three months across 1,700 miles of terrain riddled with rotten ice and hidden crevasses. No Horizon Is So Far is the inspiring true story of their ice-bound dream. Traveling in a place where temperatures plummet so low that “boiling water thrown into the air freezes instantly,” Arnesen and Bancroft shared their extraordinary experiences with more than 3 million school children from Houston to Taipei via a website, e-mail messages and satellite phone calls. Students followed the two former schoolteachers as they raced to finish the trek before the onset of the Antarctic winter, when round-the-clock daylight turns to endless stretches of darkness.

The Antarctica the women experience is more than just a desolate mass of white at the bottom of the world. It’s a wondrous landscape with “an endless horizon that shifts as you travel uphill or down. Sometimes it’s above your head, or at your midsection, or beneath your feet, but you never catch it.” Although Bancroft and Arnesen tried to cross the Ross Ice Shelf at the end of their transcontinental trek, treacherous weather conditions wouldn’t permit it. Following the heartbreaking decision to cut their trip short, the two placed a phone call to an elementary school class in Minnesota, where a young boy’s words put their deep disappointment in perspective. “I just wanted to tell you that both of you have been real role models to me,” he said. “I have a hard time in school, and I just used to feel like there were lots of things that I could never do. And now that you two guys have done this, I see that I can do anything I put my mind to. You changed my life.” Allison Block is a writer and editor in La Jolla, California.

Parents of adopted children love to recount the details of the day they first met, and Emily Prager is no exception. She begins her personal memoir, Wuhu Diary, with the moment she first came face-to-face with her new daughter, seven-month-old Lulu, at the Anhui Hotel in the city of Hefei in China, in December 1994. When the phone call announcing her baby’s arrival came, she remembers, I was so thrilled, I could hardly move. Prager, who spent part of her own childhood in Taiwan, has a deep love of China and showed a special commitment to help her daughter develop an awareness and understanding of her Chinese heritage. She enrolled Lulu at a Mandarin preschool in New York City, where she lives. And when Lulu was almost five, Prager decided to spend two months in her daughter’s birthplace, the town of Wuhu in the southern Chinese province of Anhui. She hoped to visit the orphanage where Lulu spent her first months and find out all she could about her daughter’s background.

Written in diary format, Prager’s memoir recounts the daily challenges she faced in negotiating her way through Chinese society. She enrolled Lulu in a preschool in Wuhu, and together they explored the city. An engaging and charming child, Lulu was clearly on her own journey. We see her try, in her four-year-old way, to make sense of her family, her cultural and racial heritage and her adoption. Wuhu Diary is a highly personal account of what in many ways was a courageous journey (the Pragers’ stay in China coincided with the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Kosovo by the U.S.). The diary entries are filled with fascinating information about the people Prager and her daughter met, as well as details about everyday life.

Prager is the author of three novels and a critically acclaimed short story collection. Parents who have adopted internationally, especially those who have adopted from China, will find her account a welcome addition to the growing literature on adoption.

Author Deborah Hopkinson is the parent of an internationally adopted child.

Torn between Mexican-Jewishness and American-Jewishness, Ilan Stavans traces the roots of ethnic struggle in his earnest, rewarding memoir On Borrowed Words. The subtitle reference to the four languages in his life Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish and English sometimes seems more symbolic of the individuals in Stavans’ life, who wielded an even greater influence in his development. Indeed, a long stretch in the early chapters of the book tells us more about them than about him. Bobbe Bela, Stavans’ tough Yiddish grandmother; his father, an erratic Mexican actor; and Ilan’s brother Darian, whose stutter and genius on the piano add up to an unsolved, anomalous personality, are given chapters to themselves in which Stavans seems more on-looker and analyst than participant.

In a Mexican Jewish family of Eastern European origins, Stavans was always caught between countries and languages. But the prolific author, who has been a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, states flatly, I never learned to love Mexico and spends considerable time examining his ambivalence toward the country and its culture.

At 24, he moved to New York City to become a newspaper correspondent and to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Stavans tried Zionism and political activism (and perfected his Hebrew) in Israel, took in Europe (most notably Spain, where he reconnected with the Spanish language), but felt less than complete until he returned to New York.

The truth is that all these uncertainties and strained ambivalences are unimportant in the face of Stavans’ one unswerving intellectual loyalty books.

While others strive to cover up their family’s dysfunctions, writer Marsha Recknagel has chosen to bare all. Her new book If Nights Could Talk a searingly honest, distinctly Southern memoir that brings to mind the work of Rick Bragg and Mary Karr tells of her sister’s alcoholism, her mother’s chronic helplessness and her father’s decision to disinherit his own children. Recknagel has many stories to choose from, but the focus of the book is her nephew Jamie’s struggle to overcome an abusive childhood a past that has repercussions for the entire family. When 15-year-old Jamie shows up at the door of Recknagel’s Houston home, she fears he will kill her dogs, perform Satanic rituals in her well-ordered house and worst of all, revive memories of her own troubled childhood. Yet, in a moment of impulsive compassion, she adopts Jamie and tries to lead him out of the dark cocoon into which he has withdrawn.

Her success is far from assured. As she seeks therapy, prescription drugs and a GED for Jamie, Recknagel fights to save him from the scars left by a nightmarish childhood. She must also come to terms with her own more subtly harrowing youth: the memories of a harshly demanding father, a wildcatter who made millions drilling oil, a beloved brother who is psychologically shriveled by their dad’s contempt and a sister who gets pregnant while still a teenager, then descends into the bottle.

The great strength of If Nights Could Talk is Recknagel’s unflinching candor, which rivals that of any nonfiction writer today. It’s one thing to transmute one’s demons into a novel or short story series and quite another to expose family secrets, with real names and sordid skeletons intact. Recknagel doesn’t shield herself from her own ruthless searchlight, either. She comes clean about how often she turns to alcohol when life with Jamie gets rough, and how she used her inherited wealth to resolve many of Jamie’s problems, including a life-threatening sleep apnea condition.

Don’t let the word memoir in the subtitle fool you. This is anything but a sweet stroll down someone’s memory lane. If you want to read a thoroughly honest book that tells the whole truth about one American family, read If Nights Could Talk. Marsha Recknagel has set a new benchmark for total exposure in American letters.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

With remarkable insight and honesty, Stephen Paternot has laid bare the wild ride of the Internet upstart that made him a millionaire and the even more spectacular fall as the stock market roof caved in. His candid memoir, A Very Public Offering, chronicles his six-year stint as CEO/co-founder of the- globe.com, an Internet company he and his partner Todd Krizelman started in their Cornell University dorm room.

His story starts with a bang as the globe’s initial stock offering set Wall Street records, and the 24-year-old’s share of the company was suddenly worth $97 million. But the heady days didn’t last, and Paternot describes the intimate details as the young CEOs fought for funding, battled the media and took a crash course in corporate politics. As the stock dropped to less than $1 a share, pressure mounted from co-workers and shareholders, and Paternot was forced to relinquish control as his millions evaporated. BookPage recently asked Paternot about his experience on the Internet bubble.

You were 24 and worth millions (on paper, at least). What was it like to be the poster boy of Internet mania ? It was manageable at first as mostly business press came after us, but when all the pop culture/lifestyle press came after us, things became a bit more risky. I’d often be recognized on the subway with Hey, you’re the guy from the globe, can I give you my resume? . . . Wow, you’re like a rock star now. I often didn’t know how to react [other than] be embarrassed and then duck and hide. It became much tougher as the year progressed and much of the media and investors wanted to place all the blame on us for the fall of our stock. At that point I had fought so many battles that I just wanted people to leave me alone and to crawl under a rock.

You and your partner Todd Krizelman were both very young when you started, with almost no business experience. Was that a help or a hindrance? At first our youth worked against us especially when trying to raise money. We had no experience, no prior money, no major contacts or track record to show, and we hadn’t even graduated. And Todd and I looked young (Todd like he was 15 years old). On the other hand, it made us all the more determined to prove everyone wrong and to succeed.

What do you think are the most important qualities for an entrepreneur to have? Most important is a high EQ Emotional Quotient. Any entrepreneur will know that the idea alone is just 10 percent of the value. The other 90 percent comes from sheer pushing and not giving up along the way. There will always be a million pitfalls you have to navigate around, and he or she who can keep going will make it.

What lessons did you take away from the whole experience? It taught me that anything can be achieved if you put your mind to it. You may get a few curve balls thrown at you along the way, but getting to your end goal and beyond is possible. That is the greatest measure of success in my mind. The last thing you want to do is measure your success by your net worth, or you’ll constantly have days of desperate misery.

It also taught me humility. You can be president of the United States one day, and a regular Joe the next, so don’t forget to treat people well along the way. From everything that has happened, I feel a certain strength of character within me, a greater confidence, and greater prudence and awareness.

What’s the status of the globe.com now? The company is still in business and it has now been seven years, something to be very proud of. I still own 90 percent of my stock and hope that the company will keep on surviving, even if it is as part of a bigger parent company.

What will it take for an Internet company to succeed in today’s market? They’ll need to prove that their business model can become profitable on a much smaller scale and smaller investment. No one wants to take huge financial risks right now. Otherwise, it needs to be such a powerful business model that has so much potential that everyone is ready to throw money at it (less likely).

Will you ever start another company? Ever want to go public again? I’m sure that something interesting will happen again, whether a film project or something else. I’m sure that if the timing is right, and there’s a necessity for it, then we’ll go public again. Perhaps this time I’ll opt not to be the CEO though.

<B>Kingston’s triumphant return</B> Fire is fickle, unpredictable: a simple flame can warm and brighten, while a roaring conflagration can raze and kill. But fire holds the power to transform, and <B>The Fifth Book of Peace</B>, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the National Book Award-winning author of The Woman Warrior, is an eloquent testament to that fact. This work, Kingston’s first in more than a decade, is an unusual weave of memoir and fiction resounding with poignant voices that speak to the search for a new lexicon of peace.

"If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation," Kingston’s first line announces. While this proclamation may sound overwrought, it aptly frames the author’s heart-pounding firsthand account of the October 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills firestorm. This blaze, which took lives and homes, the author’s house included, also consumed her <I>Fourth Book of Peace</I>, a novel-in-progress. After the fire, Kingston realized that she had to write anew about peace, but from a different perspective. To research the new narrative, as Kingston recounts, she traveled to China in search of three mysterious Books of Peace. But they proved elusive, and while traveling she met a Chinese cultural minister who encouraged her to deepen her quest: "You imagined Books of Peace . . .

You write them yourself." Dismayed, she realizes, "It is my responsibility to pull the Book of Peace out of nothing." Kingston first re-created a smaller fiction from her lost novel, the story of Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese-American who takes refuge in Hawaii to avoid the Vietnam draft. She also invited war veterans, protesters and activists to submit writings on war, which she incorporated into the narrative. The result is a hybrid book containing intense prose that leaps like the fire it describes, as well as quieter passages that meander evocatively as the author searches for the lost Books of Peace. Kingston’s latest work is an extraordinary personal primer on making peace. She concludes, "I am coming up with a new rule for living: Only do things that make you happy, and you will create a peaceful world." Kingston, word by word, is doing just that. <I>Alison Hood is a freelance writer based in San Rafael, California.</I>

Benson Deng’s early years were lived in a Dinka village in Sudan as close to tribal tradition as is possible in the contemporary world. His father, a respected cattle owner, had five wives. Little Benson was expected to graze the smaller livestock, and his biggest worry was the occasional lion attack. Raids by the Muslim horsemen from the north were also a tradition. In the 1980s that threat suddenly became more deadly, as the country’s northern government savaged the non-Muslim south. Benson’s mother told him, My son, the world is ending. And so it did. Benson survived, barely, only by joining an epic trek nearly unimaginable to Americans: 20,000 boys, some as young as five, many barefoot, walked 1,000 miles to flee the civil war that destroyed their villages and killed or scattered their families. Benson was seven years old. Those of the Lost Boys who lived about half ultimately ended up in Kenyan refugee camps, their plight receiving international publicity. Now we have a rare first-hand account of their struggles from Benson, his brother Alephonsion Deng and their cousin Benjamin Ajak, with assistance from their American mentor Judy A. Bernstein. The Dengs and Ajak, educated at the Kenyan camp and currently living in the United States, were smart and lucky. Tiny children when they fled, they quickly figured out the value of banding together for mutual protection with relatives from their extended families met along the road. They formed substitute families of little boys who cared for each other finding food, nursing illnesses, dodging dangers. In lucid, sometimes lovely writing, the boys tell of hunger, exhaustion, fear and loss all struggles that no child should have to bear. Benson, the oldest of the three, is particularly eloquent at explaining this horror through the words of his village childhood: Leopards were chasing us into the jaws of the lion. As the news from Darfur demonstrates, Sudan is still in crisis. But these authors made it to the U.S. 14 years after their personal horror began. Their lives are still not easy, but they endure. And, as their friend Bernstein writes, Their stories take my breath away and break my heart. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

For a more light-hearted take on the challenges of motherhood, turn to From Here to Maternity by Beth Teitell. The lifestyle columnist for the Boston Herald, Teitell never loses her sense of humor as she grapples with the life-altering experience that is motherhood. Your idea of acceptable behavior changes once you have kids, she writes. And how. Teitell harbors no earth mother delusions, admitting to sneaking her baby some formula when she tires of nursing, and coveting the fancy strollers of her neighbors. Mothers will be nodding in agreement with Teitell’s take on toddler classes, play dates and the never-ending battle to get your baby to nap. From Here to Maternity is the antidote to traditional parenting books, and a great reminder that while having kids is serious business, it doesn’t have to be serious all the time. As the mother of a nine-month-old, Amy Scribner did extensive personal research for this article.

Anne Garrels reports from the Middle East’s hottest spot Anne Garrels is barely two days away from flying back to Baghdad when BookPage reaches her at her home in Connecticut. To compound her last-minute flurry, she’s just had to have one of the family dogs put to sleep. This makes her 15 minutes late for our interview and profoundly apologetic. “We had an old boy who just didn’t make it,” she explains. If all goes as planned, the National Public Radio reporter will be in the Iraqi capital for five weeks, after which she will return for a tour promoting her new book, Naked in Baghdad, a vivid account of her experiences during the war.

Garrels’ was one of the sanest, most dispassionate voices to emerge from the media din that attended the recent invasion of Iraq. Working with her endlessly resourceful “handler,” Amer (not his real name), she beamed dispatches from her 11th-floor aerie at the seedy Palestine Hotel. Between broadcasts, she roamed the city to the extent that authorities allowed talking to officials and common folk and monitoring the changes as the invading forces came closer. Lots of listeners worried about Garrels’ safety and e-mailed their concerns to NPR. Of the audience response, she says, “I was astonished. I was in a cocoon in Baghdad, because I was on a satellite phone. It was both expensive to get onto, and I was loath to be on for any length of time for fear of being seen. So I didn’t see the e-mails that were coming in from people until very close to the end.” Naked in Baghdad has two storytellers: Garrels, of course, who gives a running account of her daily activities, observations and reflections, and her husband, magazine illustrator Vint Lawrence, who e-mails friends and family periodic summaries of what his wife has told him during their daily satellite phone conversations. He labels these e-mails “Brenda Bulletins,” a whimsical allusion to comic-book heroine Brenda Starr. The title of Garrels’ book works on two levels as well. She was reporting unprotected in a war zone, but she also had the habit of broadcasting literally naked from her hotel room at night, figuring it would give her an excuse to plead for time to get dressed (and to hide her outlawed satellite phone) if the authorities came knocking. Although Garrels had good relations with her fellow reporters, she criticizes the actions of some of them in her book, notably Geraldo Rivera and Dan Rather. Rivera, she says, endangered all working reporters by swaggering around with his own guards and announcing that he was carrying a gun. “I felt personally threatened by Geraldo[‘s conduct],” she says. “At the very time that he made those statements [about being armed] and decided to become a war correspondent, Fox [News] was being increasingly shown on satellite channels. So this wasn’t just for American domestic consumption it was being seen in real time around the world. This was serious business. We had no protection. So when somebody like Geraldo says, I’m packing heat,’ there’s an assumption there that, Gee, this is what American journalists do.'” She dismisses Rather’s face-to-face interview with Saddam Hussein just before the war started as “obsequious tripe.” A former TV reporter herself, Garrels believes that the medium too often distorts the very news it aspires to tell. As an example, she cites the attention-grabbing scenes of newly arrived American soldiers in Baghdad helping the locals topple Saddam’s statue. She says the spectacle in no way conveyed the general mood of the people at the time.

In Naked in Baghdad, Garrels depicts such a harmonious relationship with her husband that we ask if he really supports her returning to what is still a dangerous assignment. “Well, I asked him that last night once again,” she says. “When people have been married a long time, there are sort of assumed discussions. I finally looked at him and said, OK, honest and true, is it OK if I go back?’ And he said, You’d better go back. You need some new stories.'”

With an estimated one in 10 new mothers experiencing some degree of postpartum depression (PPD), Brooke Shields’ candid memoir of her experience with the condition shows just how debilitating it can be. An actress who’s been in the public eye since she herself was a baby, Shields takes a brave step in detailing an intensely personal journey in Down Came the Rain.

After difficulty conceiving and a traumatic labor and delivery, Shields fell into depression. Overwhelmed, exhausted and unable to enjoy her new baby, she finds herself wondering why she thought she was cut out for motherhood. Shields is not a dazzling writer, but her simple and honest storytelling is compelling nonetheless. Her gradual improvement due to medication, therapy, time and a network of friends and family is an important primer on how to overcome PPD. As the mother of a nine-month-old, Amy Scribner did extensive personal research for this article.

The month of August offers several great choices for reading groups. BookPage’s selections, all newly published in paperback, are listed below. We hope these titles will inspire lively discussion in your book club.

The Tale of Murasaki By Liza Dalby

Using the writings of 11th century authoress Murasaki Shikibu, who penned The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, Dalby has composed an ingenious historical narrative that delivers in rich detail the life and times of a literary legend. To entertain her friends, the well-educated Murasaki writes stories about the bold Prince Genji and his romantic escapades. When her husband, a nobleman named Nobutaka, spreads the tales around the imperial court, they earn her attention from the emperor and empress. After tragedy befalls Murasaki’s family, she is summoned to court to entertain the royal couple, and what she finds there political plotting, sexual scheming, a complex code of customs and manners snakes its way into her stories. Her masterpiece of a novel results, but there is no denying the disillusionment Murasaki experiences during her time at court. Meticulously crafted, Dalby’s novel is a letter-perfect rendering of life in 11th century Japan. A reading group guide is available online at www.anchorbooks.com. For a printed version, ask your local bookseller.

Iron Shoes By Molly Giles

In her first novel, Pulitzer Prize-nominee Giles tells the story of Kay Sorenson, a 40-year-old divorcee who hasn’t outgrown the need to please her fickle parents. Kay, a mother and librarian, gave up a promising career in music to marry her high school sweetheart, then moved back in with her parents when the relationship failed. The living arrangement proves too close for comfort: Kay’s parents criticize every aspect of her life, from her taste in clothes to her taste in men. But the friction between Kay and her mother Ida is the most damaging of all. Ida, who lost both legs to diabetes, is the quintessential family matriarch: self-centered, willful, capable of wounding with a word. As Ida faces death, Kay is forced to contemplate life without her a loss that will bring both pain and a new independence. Giles writes with wit and insight about a family forced to evaluate the ties that bind even as they come undone. A reading group guide is included in the book.

Ben in the World By Doris Lessing

Lessing, who has written more than 40 books, continues the story she began with The Fifth Child (1988), which introduced Harriet and David Lovatt, the perfect parents of four perfect kids. Their decision to have one last child brings them Ben, a violent, troubled and unattractive boy who physically threatens his siblings and ends up in an institution. In Lessing’s sequel, Ben is 18, alienated from his family and at large in an unfriendly London. His hairy, animal-like appearance places him firmly on the margins of society, where he is taken advantage of by a series of seedy characters. Ben does enjoy the company of women, who pity him, and he eventually becomes involved with a prostitute named Rita. But the relationship brings trouble from Rita’s pimp boyfriend, who involves the hapless Ben in a drug deal. By setting her protagonist free in a merciless universe, Lessing has created a brutal, unflinching narrative about the ways in which those who are misunderstood so often become the world’s victims. Ask your local bookseller for a reading group guide.

Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter By Barbara Robinette Moss

Moss’ best-selling, critically acclaimed memoir is a brave, no-holds-barred account of her hardscrabble Southern childhood. Raised poor and proud in the hills of rural Alabama, Moss is one of eight children who suffers at the hands of an unpredictable, hard-drinking father. His abuses are balanced by the efforts of Moss’ gentle mother, who instills in her children a love of art that later serves as the author’s redemption. Suffering from malnutrition a condition that leaves her features disfigured Moss fantasizes as a young girl about a transformation that will give her the face of a goddess. Escaping from her impoverished life, she puts herself through school and braves a series of corrective surgeries that heals her ruined features. Against odds that seem unbeatable, she transcends both physically and spiritually her tragic past. This darkly haunting memoir has earned Moss comparisons to everyone from Frank McCourt to Rick Bragg. A reading group guide is included in the book.