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.

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.