Dee Dee Myers is no stranger to spin. As press secretary to Bill Clinton for the first two years of his presidency, she was both the youngest (at age 31) and the first woman to serve in that high-profile position. Though her tenure was short and turbulent, she received generally favorable marks in a difficult assignment. Upon leaving the White House, she consulted on TV’s "The West Wing," where she funneled her White House experience into the character of press secretary C.J. Cregg. Now a mother of two, Myers parses political rhetoric and nuance for a living as a "stay-at-home pundit" for NBC and MSNBC.

But she swears she did not time her long-awaited memoir/manifesto, Why Women Should Rule the World, to hitch a ride on the gender train with the 2008 presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"That’s really all accidental," Myers says. "Obviously, because Hillary Clinton is running such a serious campaign, gender issues are front and center whether anybody foresaw that they would be or not. I feel lucky."

Although she knew Mrs. Clinton "fairly well," their relationship was oblique since Myers reported to the president. Ironically, in a book filled with numerous inspiring women, Hillary Clinton is strangely absent. Was the first lady not a role model for the young press secretary?

"That’s a really good question," Myers says with a sigh. "I sort of made a conscious decision not to write too much about her because I didn’t want the book to be all about her. She was not somebody that I worked for, like Dianne Feinstein, or worked for from a distance, like Geraldine Ferraro, because my focus was so intensely on Bill Clinton. She didn’t have the same kind of personal mentoring relationship with me as some of the other women that I talked about."

Unlike Scott McClellan, former press secretary to George W. Bush whose forthcoming memoir was in the works before his parking space was reassigned, Myers was in no hurry to relive her history-making trial by fire.

"Everything about working in the White House and on a presidential campaign is so intense that I knew I just wanted to let some time pass," Myers explains. "Then I started having babies. If I didn’t have two young kids, I probably would have done this sooner."

True to its title, Myers’ memoir-with-a-mission presents a compelling argument that female rule is the obvious solution to the mess men have made of things to date. Citing dozens of studies that support nature over nurture, Myers explores how innate male aggressiveness has wrecked havoc on everything from the classroom to the boardroom to the Oval Office.

By contrast, she says women are natural consensus-builders and team players whose nurturing instincts would bring about a more peaceful and prosperous world, given the chance. In fact, she cites studies that suggest that the leadership, patience and time management skills involved in childrearing are just what America needs today to reinvent itself along more sustainable lines.

On those grounds, Myers has no problem defending Hillary Clinton’s campaign claim to 36 years of experience.

"I think you see things and experience things and learn things about power and the way the presidency works from that front row seat that you couldn’t learn from many places. I think that is a legitimate claim to experience," she says. "She was the first First Lady to come to the White House with a career that had been very much separate from her husband’s. I don’t think we need to denigrate her experience and her contributions because she was ‘just the wife.’ "

Both women shared the eye-opening experience of suddenly being swept by the electoral tide onto the foreign shores of the Potomac. "

Being 31, female and from California was like the trifecta of how not to go to Washington," Myers chuckles. "My learning curve was pretty steep. But [Hillary] became what I didn’t have to become, which was kind of a Rorschach test on how we felt about women in power and wives and their proper roles."

Myers was reluctant to take the job when George Stephanopoulos offered it to her. It had all the earmarks of the classic woman’s double bind, responsibility without the authority. Her instincts proved correct: She was frequently left out of the loop on important decisions, then blasted by the press corps for withholding information. She had no illusions about why she was there.

"I think the president wanted to give me the title because I was a woman, because I had been a loyal campaign aide and he liked me," she says. "He wanted credit for naming the first woman to that position and I got it; I understood."

Myers admits she much prefers politics from the sidelines these days. She occasionally has lunch and compares notes with current White House press secretary Dana Perino, the second woman to hold the job. "I don’t have any desire to get back into it," she says. "I like being an observer."

Myers admits to torn loyalties in the 2008 Democratic race; while she finds "a lot to admire" about Hillary, her sister works for Barack Obama. Which candidate does she think will ultimately prevail?

"I’ve always believed that a war of attrition favors Hillary Clinton because when you get down in the trenches, everybody gets dirty. Everybody already thinks the Clintons are a little dirty, but if Obama gets dirty, then I think he loses much of what has made him Obama. And that’s the hell of this crazy system; it’s very hard to run as a reformer. That’s why reformers never win. And I think that’s too bad."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.

When he was a child, growing up dirt-poor in a small Alabama town, Rick Bragg seldom had any coins jingling in his pocket. But even if he had, he would never have spent a penny on a Father's Day card.

As Bragg chronicled so eloquently in his best-selling memoir, All Over but the Shoutin' (1997), his father was a hard-fisted, abusive alcoholic whose lust for whiskey far outweighed any feeling of obligation to his family. When he finally abandoned his wife and three sons, young Rick had scant good memories of Charles Bragg, none of them worthy of a card celebrating fatherhood.

But at age 46, Rick Bragg inherited his own son when the confirmed bachelor surprised himself and everyone else by marrying a tall, red-headed woman, who was "just a little bit slinky." Stumbling into the role of stepfather to a 10-year-old boy not only made Bragg examine his position in this new relationship, it also made him want to learn more about his own father. The result is the third in his series of family memoirs, The Prince of Frogtown.

Speaking from his office at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he is a professor of writing (a title he finds quite amusing), Bragg elaborated on his desire to investigate the life of a man he reviled in his first memoir a decade ago.

"I'm older now and having a boy of my own makes me look at things differently," Bragg says. "I did not want to vanish from this world and have people believe that was all he was. As I said in the book, I've written an awful lot about people in prison, and I've written how they're there for their worst moment on earth – because they caught their wife cheating on them, or they saw some ugly look, you know, and they did something that brands them and sums them up forever. But it's not all they are. I guess in a way we were my daddy's worst moment. But it's not all he was, and I wanted to find people who would say something good about him. And I did." For three years Bragg tracked down his father's friends and the family members who knew him before alcohol turned him into the bitter, brutal man Bragg remembers.

"More than anything, I wanted to write about my daddy as a little boy because I didn't know anything about him. He never said to me, 'When I was a boy, I did this.' I wanted to see what he was like as a 12-year-old, I wanted to see what he was like as a teenager. And now I know." Although he grew up near Jacksonville, Alabama, the mill town where his father spent most of his life, Bragg felt that to understand the man he needed to know more about the people whose lives depended upon its giant textile factory. Talking to the workers who breathed cotton dust day after day to earn their paltry paychecks made Rick's admiration for them turn into something much deeper.

"People sometimes talk about Southerners and working-class folks, blue-collar folks, with this kind of hokey charm – aren't they quaint? Well, you know, people bled into their machines, they lost pieces of themselves at work, they stood over these machines for 12 hours at a time and did a job that quite frankly, most people just aren't tough enough to do," Bragg says.

The Prince of Frogtown alternates between two worlds. One chapter explores the father who is gradually becoming a more fully realized person to Bragg. The next examines his own attempts to understand the boy who has become his son. The hardscrabble existence Bragg endured as a child often has him baffled by a 10-year-old who still takes comfort in a "blankey," who demands to be tucked in at night, who wants hugs and hand-holding. But Bragg wasn't just afraid his son might never be "tough enough." As he writes in the book, his fears went deeper.

"I didn't care if he rode bulls or danced ballet, and that's the truth. But what made me crazy was the idea that he was the kind of boy I used to despise, the kind who looked down his nose on the boy I was. That was it, I realized. . . . That was what needled me. My mother cleaned their houses, cooked for them, diapered them. I would not have a boy like that." But even though this boy was growing up with privileges Bragg couldn't have imagined at that age, he discovered his son has a generous spirit, not a condemning one. "I was worried he might not like my people, or worse than that, he would feel a detachment or separation – which never materialized," Bragg says. "He's a good boy and he's got a good heart and he loves going home to see my people." Juxtaposing what he learned about his father's life with what Bragg feels are his own shortcomings as a parent doesn't change the countless ways Charles Bragg betrayed his wife and sons. But it does give Rick Bragg a better understanding of the man who died young from three things: bad luck, bad decisions and too much whiskey.

"I didn't try to recreate some daddy for myself in this book—that's the least of the things that happen in it. I just wanted to know who he was as a boy and as a young man, before he fell apart. I don't think that would be too hard for people to understand, to see why I would want that to happen." Bragg also heard from Jack Andrews, his father's lifelong friend, who contributed what is probably the saddest story in this eloquent, beautifully written and moving book. Right up until the day he died, Charles Bragg continued to talk about how much he loved his wife and boys and how much he regretted the way things turned out. As Bragg writes in The Prince of Frogtown, it wasn't enough. But it was more than he had before.

"I wish it had been different, but I cannot see it. I cannot see him living off his pension, or singing a hymn, or lining up to vote. I cannot see him going home to a paid-for house, with pictures of his boys on the wall. And I cannot see her there with him, to make it complete. But now I know he did see it, and that has to be worth something." Rebecca Bain, formerly the host of the public radio author interview program, "The Fine Print," writes from her home in Nashville.

Considering the pain and suffering he experienced at the hands of no-nonsense headmasters during his Catholic school days in Limerick, Ireland, it's a wonder even to Frank McCourt that he went on to spend three decades as a high school English teacher in the New York City school system. Had he not, late in life, written Angela's Ashes, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and became, in his words, "mick of the moment," he would have slipped, upon retirement, from anonymity to obscurity: just another faceless, voiceless foot soldier on the frontlines of illiteracy. Today, the world seeks the insights and opinions for which, as a mere teacher, he was never asked.

"I think becoming a teacher was the craziest thing I could have done," McCourt says by phone from New York. " I would have been quite happy in an office somewhere, nine to five, although that would have driven me crazy looking at the clock. But I wouldn't have cared about what I was doing. There would have been no challenge. Going into the classroom was a mighty challenge." Submitted as proof: Teacher Man, the final book in his autobiographical trilogy (with Angela's Ashes and 'Tis), a more-bitter-than-sweet look back at age 75 on a teaching career about which McCourt has decidedly mixed feelings. Here, McCourt takes to task bumbling administrators, callous instructors and an educational system that seems perpetually intent on doing everything but educating. Suffice to say, this is no Up the Down Staircase.

What McCourt always wanted to do, he says, was write. But by the time he returned to America at age 19, his impoverished Irish childhood had shattered his confidence and left him with minimal expectations.

"The lowest! The lowest! I never expected to go to college. I was ready to settle for some low-level job, clerk in a bank or insurance company, anything. I would have made a great elevator operator or something like that," he says. "You get out (of poverty) but you don't get out; it's with you for the rest of your life unless you're very conscious and you go on and study what it was and look at the damage that was done and you remedy it. But I wasn't like that." In Teacher Man, McCourt describes how, fresh out of New York University, he was almost fired his first day of teaching at McKee Vo-Tech on Staten Island for intercepting and eating a flying baloney sandwich. His second day, he triggered calls from angry parents for a classroom comment about friendship with sheep. Just showing up for work in those Blackboard Jungle days took every available ounce of will.

"I had absolute dread similar to what I felt as a kid going to school in Ireland," he recalls. "We went to school in a state of terror because you never knew which way the schoolmaster would jump; you never knew what you didn't know and of course he would ask you what you didn't know and then he would pounce on you and drag you out of your seat and knock you around the room. Kids here complain about going to school but we had reason to be terrified. Our knees would knock." McCourt soon learned to use his lilting accent and natural storytelling gift to capture and hold the attention of a classroom full of adolescents. His techniques were admittedly unconventional; he once assigned students to write their mother's favorite recipes, then bring the finished products to a class potluck lunch in the park. By his estimation, it took him 15 years to figure out how to actually teach with authority.

"They knew I was a novice and I think they gave me a break, mainly because of my accent and my stupid inability to do anything right," he says. " Except that I would make an occasional breakthrough, which consisted of me being human and honest, and that's what carried me along for the next 15 years, going from McKee to Fashion Industries to Seward Park and Stuyvesant, which was heaven." The harder he worked, the more he resented the school administrators with their private offices, secretaries and leisure time.

"It's a big racket, they get so many benefits," he says. "The real hardest workers in the system are the people in the classroom. It's the only profession where you're paid more for not doing it! And there are the peripheral jobs: walking the hallways, checking the lavatories, supervising the cafeteria. This is demeaning, and you only do this to teachers. You don't expect a surgeon to mop the floor in the operating room, but that's the equivalent of what teachers have to do." If he had it to do over again, would he go into teaching? Probably not.

"I suppose in the back of my head the thing I always wanted to do was write, but write what? I didn't know. Nobody told me you had to find your own style; I wanted to be Hemingway or Sean O'Casey. In retrospect, I would have thrown caution to the winds and become a busboy and lived cheaply and repaired to my attic and struggled with my writing, but I didn't know enough. And I certainly wasn't going to write about my life; that was the last thing on my mind, to write about this poverty. The shame; it was the shame. But the opposite prevails in American life, which is, this is your material so get into it, buster. Which is what I did."

Does Teacher Man truly mark the end of his memoirs? "Yeah, that's it," McCourt says with finality. "If you call me next year, you won't find me talking about myself. I want to write a novel that has nothing to do with me; maybe the ideal me, a debonair buccaneer lover of the ages, a man who defies the Vatican and the White House, something like that. Maybe I'm entering my epic period!"

Jay MacDonald writes professionally in Oxford, Mississippi.