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.