J.D. Dolan’s latest autobiographical work exposes the author’s journey from a young child’s dream world of innocence and extreme brotherly adulation into the sobering, bitter realization and loss associated with adulthood and tragedy. Dolan was born into an all-American family, though 11 years younger than his brother. Along with his two older sisters, his brother practically raised him. As a result, the brother became for Dolan an idolized figure along the lines of John Wayne. But as American idols live large and hard, occasionally, so too do they fall. Sadly, this is the case with Dolan’s brother. From the beginning, everything he sees in his brother is the definition of cool the Corvette, motorcycles, the Marlboros and Old Spice, the guns, and the girls and Dolan’s infatuated recollections of him are to the point and real. In my earliest memories of my brother, writes Dolan, he’d seemed to me a gigantic figure, a grown-up, an inscrutable god. His vivid descriptions of family life and growing up in the shadow of a restless soul give readers a glimpse of this larger than life figure coming of age, being shipped out to Vietnam, and returning home more mature, quieter, older. Suddenly, the deep brotherly bond becomes an almost painfully mute relationship.

The progression from a healthy, happy family in the midst of the American dream into years of self-imposed silence and growing distance between members is told as if this fate is common to all families to a certain degree. The innocence of youth and physical health steadily decompose, and readers are left feeling the tragic loss which has been Dolan’s all too real experience. Phoenix: A Brother’s Life captures the love and admiration some brothers feel for each other, as well as the changes they undergo as they mature into individuals with separate lives. It would be more comforting in the end (though certainly less realistic) to see something rise out of the ashes, something other than a relief that suffering is finally over, and only a numb feeling of loss remains. Jamie McAlister writes from his home in Charleston, South Carolina.

For one fleeting, “iridescent” moment, that crucial summer of 1972, June Sprigg considered committing to the Shaker way of life. In a way, she has. She didn’t, of course, sign the Covenant; even if she wanted to, the Shakers no longer accepted converts. Since celibacy formed an important tenant of their faith, and membership had peaked more than a century earlier, only a few of their number remained. In that remnant mostly female and faltering physically faith, duty, and love burned as brightly as ever, igniting in the then-19-year-old Sprigg a hunger to discover and internalize their quality of contentment.

The author’s interest in Shaker workmanship and a curiosity about the Believers themselves first dawned during childhood vacations, but it was during that first summer at a Shaker community in Canterbury, New Hampshire, that the direction of her life changed forever. Sprigg searched photo albums and the absorbing journals of Shaker Elders, she guided tours, and immersed herself in the aura of days long past yet startlingly present. There, she recorded her observations in journal entries and drawings; there, Simple Gifts finds its genesis less in researched information than through actually experiencing the atmosphere and personalities of the Shaker life.

With Simple Gifts, Sprigg continues to enliven the history of this unique tradition and its followers. “Hands to work, hearts to God” shapes the Shaker ethic, in which the community is emphasized over the individual; precision is paramount in craftsmanship, in relationships, and in personal actions; technology is embraced when it leads to proficiency and product, rejected where it threatens unity.

Perhaps dearest to young June while in Canterbury were Lillian, a gifted musician, 80 years a Shaker, who had come as a teenager for physical healing and unexpectedly found her calling, and Bertha, consummate cook, who functioned more comfortably as a “simple Kitchen Sister” than in leadership roles thrust upon her as Eldress. Gertrude, Eldress recently transplanted from the Sabbathday Lake community, was a night-owl, unfailingly late for breakfast, but forgiven not only because forgiveness came readily to the Shaker spirit, but also for her unflagging charm. Her malapropisms provided continual amusement.

That summer of 1972 changed Sprigg’s life, and she, in turn, enriches others’ lives by perpetuating the record of this remarkable sect through her writing and sketches. In Simple Gifts, the author’s crystalline imagery, insightful observations, and gentle portraits transport the reader to a serenity not often achieved. With Sprigg, readers walk a rich path. Perhaps, with such a knowledgeable tour guide, readers will explore deeper possibilities for their own life experiences.

Reviewed by Evelyn Minshull.

It is a startling coincidence to have, in one season, the appearance of not one but two memoirs about William Shawn, the former editor of the New Yorker Ved Mehta’s Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing and Lillian Ross’s Here but Not Here: A Love Story but perhaps more interesting is that, while each is an elegy for Shawn, the two books couldn’t be more different.

The differences make Mehta’s and Ross’s memoirs complementary; indeed, alone, each is only a partial picture of Shawn, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief for more than three decades. In his book, Mehta, a staff writer at the magazine from 1961-1994, depicts the platonic but intense affection between a writer and his editor. In her book, Ms. Ross, also a longtime New Yorker staff writer, delivers without apology the confessional tale of her over 40-year- long affair with the married Shawn. Mehta’s memoir which is as gorgeously written as his magazine pieces and his previous 20 books (Remembering is the eighth in an autobiographical series entitled Continents of Exile) is a lament not only for Shawn but for a bygone era of chivalrous good intentions and courtly behavior in the literary world, an era of editorial paternalism and excellent manners. Shawn’s New Yorker which lasted from 1952-1987, when Shawn, at the age of 77, was asked by the new owner of the magazine to resign was less a business than a family, peopled by the likes of J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Renata Adler, A.J. Liebling, St. Clair McKelway, and Maeve Brennan, writers to whom Shawn demonstrated fatherly allegiance. Not only did Shawn respond like a "Talmudic scholar," to his writers’ work, says Mehta, he frequently ministered to their more personal needs including, in some cases, forgiving them their messy debts and hospitalizing them when mental illness or alcoholism overtook them. In Here but Not Here, Ms. Ross, covers similar historic ground, but laments more directly the loss of Shawn as a person. Ross’s purpose is to make the reader see the real Shawn hopelessly in love, plagued by phobias, blocked in his own writing, and overwhelmed by his own invisibility as an editor and a human being. "Responsible as he was, toward the magazine and the lives of all the creative people involved with it," Ross writes, "attuned as he made himself to all their frailties and disappointments and successes and joys," Shawn "could do nothing to help himself. He wanted someone to know and believe there was more to him; he was desperate to feel alive." In late 20th-century America, when the line between the public and the private has become utterly blurred, Mehta’s is the decidedly public memoir of Shawn and Ross’s the utterly personal. Ross’s book complicates and completes Mehta’s reverent portraiture, but raises the question: How is one to reconcile the two William Shawns Mehta’s Algonquin-frequenting, dignified father figure, and Ross’s obsessive lover, who would leave his editorial desk at night and stand across the street from Ross’s fifth floor apartment, staring up for hours at her lighted window? In the end, these memoirs are twin halves not only of Shawn, but of an era in American culture the early to mid 1960s a time of public good taste and, behind the scenes, some very private secrets. Reviewed by Julie Checkoway.