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.