Seventeen-year-old, college-bound Lauralee Summer never thought the details of her life were so extraordinary that they would show up in newspapers and soar over the American airwaves. But after she won a wrestling scholarship and, as a result, got interviewed by the Boston Globe and Associated Press, her story went nationwide. The ubiquitous headlines proclaimed triumphantly: “Homeless to Harvard.” Summer’s curiously titled memoir, Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars, reveals a fatherless, nomadic life lived with her rarely employed, eccentric though loving mother. Constantly moving through the dreary, often dangerous confines of homeless shelters and flimsy welfare housing, they had no car, no bank account and little money for food or clothing. Summer’s schooling was erratic, but she loved books from an early age. Not until she reached high school did she find the mentors and activities (especially competitive wrestling with an all-male team) that moved her toward self-acceptance and into the privileged realms of Harvard. Requests for network television appearances came pouring in after the surge of front-page press. Summer was aghast when, during a nationally televised interview, the host asked her what it was like to be homeless and gave her only 20 seconds to reply. Being forced to provide an abbreviated response eventually led to the writing of her memoir. And in the telling, Summer admits she has claimed her place in the world and built herself an authentic home. Using the constructs of her life poverty, neglect and isolation and her Harvard education, she has created a clear window into the shadowy, disenfranchised world of impoverished women and children. If the walls of Summer’s house are a bit rough-hewn, hers is a sturdy and honest dwelling. For it houses a young writer who possesses courage, heart and social compassion, who has, in the words of an anonymous, homeless youth, “learned patience from statues in a thousand parks, and joy from dogs without collars.” Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.

There was a time when the art of memoir-writing was generally relegated to the rich, famous and powerful. Not so nowadays, when complete unknowns if their tales of dysfunction or triumph over challenges are resonant enough get published fairly readily. Augusten Burroughs fits the new mold, having gained recognition with 2002’s Running With Scissors, the true-life account of his strange upbringing and nightmarish youthful experiences that was a national bestseller. Burroughs’ follow-up memoir, Dry, charts his recent struggle with substance abuse. The topic here is not a new one, but the author’s flippant, knowing style makes this book a cut above other entries in the genre.

Dry finds the author in his mid-20s and carving out a high-paying career in New York advertising. After mounting episodes of personal irresponsibility force his colleagues to hold an in-office intervention, he is whisked away to the Proud Institute in Duluth, Minnesota, where he undergoes a recovery regimen tailored to the needs of homosexuals. Burroughs completes the program and returns to the Big Apple, sober but cautious. He reclaims his job and attends AA meetings with the appropriate enthusiasm. Alas, he also meets a fellow recovering addict named Foster, who entices him back into addictive behavior. When a dear old friend finally succumbs to AIDS, Burroughs falls completely off the wagon. But once again, he dedicates himself to getting straight, armed with hard-won knowledge. “The good news is you do learn to live without it,” he writes. “You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.” In truth, Dry is anything but cloying. It’s a smart, revealing book that should please those readers who enjoyed Burroughs’ previous memoir. Martin Brady is a freelance writer in Nashville.

<B>Remembering Dear Ol’ Dad</B> With Father’s Day fast approaching, we’ve taken the opportunity to delve into several new books that examine the bond between fathers and children. Whether you’re interested in a gift for Dad or a chance to ponder the importance of a father’s role, these four selections offer meaningful ways to mark the occasion.

<B>Keeping his priorities straight</B> Offer dad a little love and encouragement with <!–BPLINK=0071422226–><B>My List: 24 Reflections on Life’s Priorities</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (McGraw-Hill, $14.95, 80 pages, ISBN 0071422226), an inspiring book that will get him to focus on the important things in life. Based on the hit country single written by Nashville tunesmiths Rand Bishop and Tim James, the book will help readers put the song’s powerful message into play. With a foreword by singer Toby Keith, who made the single a chart-topper, the book advises readers to set and achieve simple goals that can make life more fulfilling, including going for a walk, playing catch with the kids and sleeping late. It’s a rewarding little read, filled with sparkling photos, Bible verses and memorable quotes, that’s just right for stressed-out dads. And the enclosed CD of the single will keep him humming. <B>Doing his fatherly duty</B> A father follows his son into the world of scouting in <!–BPLINK=0151005923–><B>Scout’s Honor: A Father’s Unlikely Foray into the Woods</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Harcourt, $24, 368 pages, ISBN 0151005923). Author Peter Applebome was never a Boy Scout himself, so he was surprised (and a bit dubious) when his son Ben decided to join Troop 1 of Chappaqua Falls in upstate New York. As he learns to camp and canoe along with the boys, he discovers the rewards of the great outdoors and a deeper connection with his son. Applebome comes to appreciate his son’s decision to join the troop, chronicling his journey from skeptic to Scout with humor, ease and honesty. <I>Scout’s Honor</I> will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in the outdoors and the crucial, ever-evolving father-son bond.

<B>Adopted fathers ease a boy’s painful loss</B> Moved by reading about the victims of 9/11, many of whom left behind families with young children, writer Kevin Sweeney was prompted to recall his own experience of losing his father when he was three years old. The resulting memoir, <!–BPLINK=0060511923–><B>Father Figures</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Regan, $22.95, pages, ISBN 0060511923), is both a nostalgic recollection of growing up during the 1960s in a large Irish-Catholic family and a perceptive exploration of grief’s long-term toll. Comforted by friends, neighbors and teachers and mentored by a stoic older brother, the young Sweeney bravely soldiers on after his father’s death. At the age of eight, he decides to "adopt" three adult men to serve as his role models and guides to manhood. Each man unknowingly lends valuable assistance to the boy on his sometimes painful journey through childhood and adolescence. Poignant without being maudlin, Sweeney’s story beautifully conveys the significance of a father’s role and offers hope that even the most profound of life’s tragedies can be endured and overcome.

<B>Death opens a door</B> It’s never too late to repair your relationship with your father (or child). That’s the message of Barry Neil Kaufman’s inspiring memoir, <B>No Regrets: Last Chance for a Father and Son</B>. Kaufman was a successful author, counselor and father when he received a call from his own 83-year-old father, who had just been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Despite a long-standing rift between the two, the father’s illness is greeted by Kaufman as an opportunity for reconnecting with his parent. "Even if he never knew or understood me, I could, at least, come to know him if I opened my heart," Kaufman writes. The two eventually put their difficult relationship behind and forge new bonds that comfort both the ailing father and his determined son.

<B>Remembering Dear Ol’ Dad</B> With Father’s Day fast approaching, we’ve taken the opportunity to delve into several new books that examine the bond between fathers and children. Whether you’re interested in a gift for Dad or a chance to ponder the importance of a father’s role, these four selections offer meaningful ways to mark the occasion.

<B>Keeping his priorities straight</B> Offer dad a little love and encouragement with <!–BPLINK=0071422226–><B>My List: 24 Reflections on Life’s Priorities</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (McGraw-Hill, $14.95, 80 pages, ISBN 0071422226), an inspiring book that will get him to focus on the important things in life. Based on the hit country single written by Nashville tunesmiths Rand Bishop and Tim James, the book will help readers put the song’s powerful message into play. With a foreword by singer Toby Keith, who made the single a chart-topper, the book advises readers to set and achieve simple goals that can make life more fulfilling, including going for a walk, playing catch with the kids and sleeping late. It’s a rewarding little read, filled with sparkling photos, Bible verses and memorable quotes, that’s just right for stressed-out dads. And the enclosed CD of the single will keep him humming. <B>Doing his fatherly duty</B> A father follows his son into the world of scouting in <!–BPLINK=0151005923–><B>Scout’s Honor: A Father’s Unlikely Foray into the Woods</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Harcourt, $24, 368 pages, ISBN 0151005923). Author Peter Applebome was never a Boy Scout himself, so he was surprised (and a bit dubious) when his son Ben decided to join Troop 1 of Chappaqua Falls in upstate New York. As he learns to camp and canoe along with the boys, he discovers the rewards of the great outdoors and a deeper connection with his son. Applebome comes to appreciate his son’s decision to join the troop, chronicling his journey from skeptic to Scout with humor, ease and honesty. <I>Scout’s Honor</I> will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in the outdoors and the crucial, ever-evolving father-son bond.

<B>Adopted fathers ease a boy’s painful loss</B> Moved by reading about the victims of 9/11, many of whom left behind families with young children, writer Kevin Sweeney was prompted to recall his own experience of losing his father when he was three years old. The resulting memoir, <B>Father Figures</B>, is both a nostalgic recollection of growing up during the 1960s in a large Irish-Catholic family and a perceptive exploration of grief’s long-term toll. Comforted by friends, neighbors and teachers and mentored by a stoic older brother, the young Sweeney bravely soldiers on after his father’s death. At the age of eight, he decides to “adopt” three adult men to serve as his role models and guides to manhood. Each man unknowingly lends valuable assistance to the boy on his sometimes painful journey through childhood and adolescence. Poignant without being maudlin, Sweeney’s story beautifully conveys the significance of a father’s role and offers hope that even the most profound of life’s tragedies can be endured and overcome.

<B>Death opens a door</B> It’s never too late to repair your relationship with your father (or child). That’s the message of Barry Neil Kaufman’s inspiring memoir, <!–BPLINK=1932073027–><B>No Regrets: Last Chance for a Father and Son</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (New World Library, $22.95, 320 pages, ISBN 1932073027). Kaufman was a successful author, counselor and father when he received a call from his own 83-year-old father, who had just been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Despite a long-standing rift between the two, the father’s illness is greeted by Kaufman as an opportunity for reconnecting with his parent. “Even if he never knew or understood me, I could, at least, come to know him if I opened my heart,” Kaufman writes. The two eventually put their difficult relationship behind and forge new bonds that comfort both the ailing father and his determined son.

Nevada Barr is sporting a new hat. For her latest book, she has put her deeply creased “writer of mystery thrillers” chapeau on its peg and donned one fit for a venture into the genre of spiritual memoir. Seeking Enlightenment . . . Hat by Hat: A Skeptic’s Look at Religion is a record of Barr’s journey from being a borderline atheist in her youth to a deeply spiritual though not categorically Christian adult. Barr still brings her “sleuthing,” analytical mind to her search for inner peace and spiritual understanding, though the hat she wears for this work is broader-brimmed and not without a bit of bounce and whimsy.

Her upbringing in Nevada (yes, she’s named for her birth state) did not prepare her for the unapologetic talk of “God” and “Jesus” she encountered when she moved to Mississippi, but she was ready to listen. “I doubt a trip to Dixie would bring God into everybody’s life,” she explains, “but when I arrived, I had pretty much exhausted all other avenues. My marriage had gone down in flames. I was clinically depressed, haunted by nightmares, broke and, at the age of 41, embarking on my third career, this time as a law enforcement ranger for the National Park Service.” Her protagonist, Anna Pigeon (featured in such bestsellers as Flashback, Hunting Season and Blood Lure), happens to be a crime-solving park ranger, so Barr’s move to the South was fortuitous in more ways than one.

Despair and loneliness drove her out of her apartment one evening for a walk. The dimly-lit stained glass windows of a nearby church attracted her. She decided to try the door, figuring if it wasn’t locked, she could sit inside and brood alone. The door was open, but there were four women inside; they herded her in, talked with her, made her feel welcome. It happened to be an Episcopal Church Barr stumbled into that night, and she became a member and has “hung her hat” there ever since. From then on, she explains, “I have been on a wonderful journey, sometimes Christian, sometimes not, but always in communion with other people.” While writing from her own experience eliminated the extensive plotting and research required for a novel, Barr explained in a recent interview that this work had its own difficulties. “In some ways, this was easier. For one thing, each chapter is between two and six pages long, so I got to feel a sense of accomplishment finishing each section along the way. I didn’t have to wait for the full closure of a novel.” Still, Seeking Enlightenment was a major undertaking. “I spent about a year on it, but it covers the thoughts of a lifetime,” Barr says. “The hardest part, though,” and here she breaks into laughter, “was when it was actually accepted. I didn’t even tell my editor I was working on it I just did it and then, when I sent it in and they bought it, there was this feeling: Oh no! Have I just volunteered to run naked through Times Square? Because it’s so personal!” But Barr recognized early on in the writing that in order to bare her soul and write honestly about topics like “Sin,” “Prayer,” “Humility,” and “An Argument for Life After Death” (all among the mini-chapters in her book) she had no choice but to use the “I” word. “If it wasn’t personal, it would be preaching,” she points out. “And I didn’t want to do that. And if it weren’t personal, who would identify with it? Women are very personal animals.” Despite her spiritual awakening, there is no “holier-than-thou” tone to Seeking Enlightenment, and it will undoubtedly strike a chord with many women, who, like Barr, are of the “baby boomer” generation. “What we know intellectually and how we behave seems oddly dichotomous,” Barr admits. “I believe with every cell of my being that cigarettes cause cancer,” she says laughing candidly, “and yet I smoke four cigarettes a day come rain or shine.” Seeking Enlightenment . . . Hat by Hat may be the saga of one woman’s spiritual journey, but there is much to identify with and plenty to learn from Barr’s experience. Hats off to you, Nevada Barr!

Robb White shortchanges himself with the title of his new memoir, How to Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt. The book is so much more than its name entails. First of all, White made the tin canoe in question when he was a kid, but for four decades since then he has been building wooden boats. Second, the book is as much about life as it is about boats, and it will amuse and inform campers, anglers, sailors and just about anybody else who’s willing to disengage themselves from the web or the television and taste the open air.

White recalls that he was about 8 years old when he captained his first boat; among his “crew” were 4-year-olds who he says knew more about the fish in the Gulf of Mexico and the Georgia wetlands than most graduate students in a nearby university marine lab. White’s “rule of joy” permeates this warm and sometimes irreverent memoir of an outdoor life that flowered from those early years: “The important thing ain’t comfort, it’s joy. Joy in boats is inverse to their size. When they get big and full of engines, batteries, toilets, stoves, and other comforts, there just ain’t as much room for joy.” This is also a story of self-reliance: “I do not trust machinery of any kind,” the author writes. “I never go out in a boat that cannot be propelled some other way. I’ll be damned if I’ll undignify myself by sitting helplessly out there in the hot sun dialing 911 on a cellular phone. I would rather row 30 miles, and indeed I have.” White’s father was a prolific author and television and movie scriptwriter. His sister, Bailey White, an occasional NPR commentator, is the best-selling author of Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel. It’s now clear that Robb White, who knows and shares “a thing or two about a thing or two,” has also been blessed with the gene of gifted storytelling. Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami.

You can’t accuse Robert MacNeil of being impulsive. The novelist, playwright and former host of The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour worked in the United States on and off for 45 years before he decided to cast his lot with the Yanks and become an American citizen. Looking For My Country explains how he reached this decision and traces his career as a frontline newsman.

MacNeil, who was born in Montreal and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had two American grandparents. But his mother was an Anglophile who saw little to admire in that country to the south. MacNeil made his first foray into America in 1952, seeking work as an actor. Then, after laboring as a print and television journalist in England for a few years, he returned to America in 1963 as a reporter for NBC. The new job plunged him into the middle of some of the great stories of the century, among them the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of President Kennedy. In 1975, MacNeil launched the program that would become The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. There he remained until 1995. Two years later, he became an American citizen partly for convenience and partly from a growing appreciation of what the country meant to him. “Just when you think that there isn’t any new news and you’ve seen everything come and go,” he tells BookPage from his office in New York, “then something like the present war [with Iraq] happens or something like 9/11 happens, which certainly shook my thinking and had a profound effect on me. 9/11 made me understand my attachment to this country in an emotional way that I don’t think I understood before. It had been creeping up on me. Then, suddenly, I felt defensive about it, and a lot of my equivocation just vanished.” It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that the 72-year-old author has become a flack for Old Glory. He still speaks of America with the same measured tone and reportorial detachment that endeared him to a generation of news junkies. Besides the new book, he’s written a play about Karla Faye Tucker, the murderer turned devout Christian who was executed in Texas in 1998. The play has already had a workshop production in Connecticut and is now in search of a New York venue. MacNeil is also overseeing a special for PBS called Do You Speak American?, a sequel to the acclaimed The Story Of English series, which he helped produce for PBS in the 1980s.

Being a foreign-born reporter on an American beat was never particularly difficult, MacNeil recalls. “You learn, just as you learn good manners, how to approach things with a certain amount of diplomacy. Also, when I didn’t like something, I could keep my opinion to myself. After I became a citizen, I felt freer to say what I thought about this country, both negative and positive. I think I had been, consciously and subconsciously, biting my tongue in the past.” MacNeil does precious little tongue-biting in his book. He points out America’s lack of comprehensive health care, its harsh penal system and its refusal to control guns. “The luxury of not being in the [news] business anymore,” he says, “is that I can say things like that, and I don’t have to pretend.” But MacNeil is quick to acknowledge that America has become a far more open society than the one he first visited. “Oh, I think hugely less puritanical,” he says. “There’s the relaxation of the sexual mores, for example, and greater tolerance for all kinds of behavior that would have shocked people 50 years ago. The last half-century has been an amazing period of informalizing in America. [Consider] the sodomy case that is being heard in the Supreme Court now. The expectation is that the Court will overturn those laws because society has become increasingly tolerant of homosexual behavior. That’s a huge change. And I’m in favor of that because I have a gay son, who’s a very successful theater designer.” Citizenship, MacNeil reflects, enables him to engage in politics at a level he finds comfortable: “I never wanted to be a pundit. I never wanted to write op-ed pages or go on television and sound off about things or be a politician. I’m happy to have my own opinion and air it when I think it’s necessary.” Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

You’d think that life-long friendships would bond a group of coal miners rescued after more than a week of being buried alive, but it didn’t work out that way for the 18 Nova Scotians whose story Melissa Fay Greene recounts in her new book Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster. Surviving nature’s violence and overcoming bruised egos were only two of the challenges the men faced as a result of the disaster, which Greene recounts through exhaustive and meticulous research. Remarkably, she is able to reconstruct their 1958 ordeal of being entombed in the world’s deepest coal mine, located in Springhill, Nova Scotia, as well as the aftermath of the tragedy, and she caps the story with a wonderfully moving account of the town’s remembrances more than four decades later.

After the underground geological convulsion that claimed 75 lives, Greene finds “deep in the pit, the survivors loved their mothers and wives more tenderly than ever and promised God they’d show the women how much they loved them, if only they could be released from this hole and permitted to walk, once more, up a little blacktop street toward home.” Then, using their own words, she records the trapped miners’ swings from determination and anger to disgust and fear, and, in some cases, hallucination. However, disaster does not always equal hopelessness, and we also meet the heroes, the miners who buoyed the spirits of their colleagues while the odor of rotting corpses wafted around them. After the rescue, the media, as is their wont, singled out one miner for more attention than the others, sowing resentment and dividing forever the men who once were united in tragedy. We see how they coped or didn’t cope with post-trauma stress and how the passing of years has twisted their memories and their families’ recollections of the most important event of their lives. This is a superb study of the human condition in extremis. Now we can almost laugh at the conniptions of hapless Georgia officials who seeking to promote segregated Jekyll Island as a resort area invited the miners to vacation there, only to discover that the last man rescued was black.

Greene’s previous books, Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing, were National Book Award finalists. Last Man Out will challenge those readers who tend to prolong the pleasure of a compelling book by rationing the last chapters; they set the book aside after savoring one page and return to it later. This book is sure to break them of that habit. Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an ex-newsman and college lecturer.

The impetus to travel usually springs from a pleasurable sense of physical restlessness. But it was a feeling of spiritual unease that provided the catalyst for journalist Fenton Johnson’s recent odyssey. His fascinating personal chronicle Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey is a provocative account of travels both literal and metaphorical undertaken in an effort to redefine his spiritual faith. When Johnson, a disenfranchised Roman Catholic, is invited to an international gathering of Christian and Buddhist monks at the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he attends, planning to use the experience as material for an article. But he’s surprised during the opening prayers by a sudden paralyzing anger that prevents him from making the reverential sign of the cross: “I have known this script since before memory . . . a simple gesture I once inhabited as easily as lifting my hand to wave goodbye . . . and I could not do it,” he marvels. So begins Johnson’s “cross-country journey through the briars and thistles of faith,” during which he ruthlessly dissects the disillusionment and skepticism that had grown from his Roman Catholic roots. He voluntarily enters periods of residential life at both western Buddhist and Christian monasteries, notably California’s Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery and Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey. These residential immersions, which afford unique opportunities to interview monastic community members and teachers, complement the author’s rigorous ecumenical research. The result is a unique spiritual and philosophical investigation: a tightly woven helix of self-examination, historical discussion and inquiry into the sublime and perilous landscapes of religious belief and faith. Rich in honest self-revelation and the glories of an open-hearted search for sacred connection, Keeping Faith offers valid inspiration for spiritual seeking. Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.

<B>Sandra Day O’Connor lightens up a little</B>

John Riggins, the pro football player, once embarrassed himself and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with a comment he made while in his cups sitting next to her at a Washington fund-raiser. "Lighten up, Sandy Baby," he was alleged to have said. The frosty reply of the first woman in history to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court is not recorded. <B>The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice</B>, Sandra Day O’Connor’s new book, reflects her serious side, but it’s written in a light, informative and elegantly simple style. Not only informative to laymen and lawyers alike it’s elevating, and the author’s dedication and love of the law shines through on every page. O’Connor has divided the book into six parts, with sections focusing on history, women in law, and law in the 21st century, among other topics. Particularly interesting is her selection of seven past members of the court who she feels made notable contributions to the court and the judicial system. Although Oliver Wendell Holmes is on the list, there are others who might surprise the reader. One in this category is Chief Justice Warren Burger, who has never enjoyed particularly good standing among the academics who write about the court. Justice Lewis Powell is profiled for his personal traits. "For those who seek a model of human kindness, decency, exemplary behavior, and integrity, there will never be a better man," O’Connor writes. Thurgood Marshall is the raconteur, Holmes the giant in the area of individual rights, William Howard Taft (the only former president to sit on the court) the great and politic chief justice often overshadowed by John Marshall, and Charles Evans Hughes the chief justice who helped defeat the Roosevelt court-packing plan. <B>The Majesty of the Law</B> contains a number of interesting details. We learn, for instance, that the bas-relief of Chief Justice Marshall in a dining room of the Supreme Court was actually sculpted by Justice Burger. We also find out that the justices shake hands before sitting to hear cases each day.

In one sense, reading this book is a bittersweet experience. O’Connor articulately and eloquently describes the workings of the system of justice we enjoy. She explores judicial principles and administrative aspects of the Supreme Court, and gives her views on leading judicial figures. She discusses the lack of civility in the current legal profession. What she does not do and what no sitting Supreme Court justice in our times has ever done is "talk out of school" and tell us some of the things we’re dying to know. What was it like behind the scenes when the Bush v. Gore decision was made? Does she have any regrets regarding that decision? Is the current ideological split on the court uncomfortable? Does she want to be chief justice and, if not, who does she think would be best for the job? We may never get her answers to those questions, at least as long as she sits on the court. This is O’Connor’s second venture into writing a book. Her memoir <I>Lazy B</I>, an account of her childhood on a large Arizona ranch, revealed a compact but engaging writing style that she employs to advantage in this book as well. Simple, straightforward and never turgid, <B>The Majesty of the Law</B> makes interesting reading for anyone with a desire to know our court system better. <I>R. Dobie Langenkamp is an attorney and professor of law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.</I>