Go ahead. Give that "to-be-read" pile of kids' lit or YA novels a break.

It was a year of strong, passionate memoirs, and if this was a pick of the best books of 2007—which it isn't, although many of these titles have appeared on various end-of-the-year lists—then I'd be forced to include a few more first-person accounts. Instead, this list offers school and youth librarians something different. As professionals, we're all about feeding the minds of young readers. For once, let's just forget about them—and can the guilt. This list of new books was created with you in mind: to challenge, provoke, and entertain your adult brain. Child soldiers in Sierra Leone, a depressed cartoonist, a near-saint's struggles with God.... "Where is the pleasure?" you may ask. It comes from encountering a voice so sure, so convincing, that you can't let go of his or her story, however harrowing it may be. Or from being transported to a distant country—or time period—with such immediacy, you can't help but think about our own time and place quite differently. No, these aren't easy pleasures, but they're pleasures just the same. So duplicate this article, or—hello, online reader!—bookmark this page for that day when life slows down a little and the hammock, deserted island, or at least the couch beckons. You will return a better librarian, I promise. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Beah, Ishmael. Farrar. $22. ISBN 978-0374105235. This first-person account of one young boy's transformation from child to guerilla warrior is as terrifying as it is vivid. Beah, a self-described "naughty" 12-year-old in Africa's Sierra Leone, loved old-school rap music and hip-hop. One day, in 1993, Beah, along with his older brother and a friend, decided to trek 16 miles to perform in a talent show. That day, rebels destroyed his village, and he never saw his family again. The boys became a rag-tag family, struggling to survive, until a platoon of Sierra Leone troops "selected" them as soldiers. Fueled by marijuana, cocaine, and "brown brown" (a mix of cocaine and gunpowder), and with their families and friends dead, they became the perfect boy soldiers. Off-hours, they cleaned their AK-47s, and, to stay "up" for battle, repeatedly viewed violent movies like Rambo. Their commanding officers constantly urged them to avenge their families' deaths—a potent message that left little room for moral ambiguities. Then one day, when Beah was 15, it all stopped. He was turned over to UNICEF for rehabilitation and "repatriation" (uniting ex-boy soldiers with their former communities). Beah had to relearn trust, withdraw from drugs, and surmount a powerful addiction to violence. He also faced the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome: migraines, vivid dreams, and terrifying flashbacks. Beah's struggle to regain his humanity is absolutely compelling and undeniably affecting. Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature. Flannery, Tim. Grove. $24. ISBN 978-0802118523. Flannery, the Australian scientist who made the complexities of global climate change comprehensible in the best-selling The Weather Makers (Grove, 2006), here chronicles his lifelong love affair with that most enigmatic and emblematic of all Australian marsupials: the kangaroo. A geologist with a background in biology, Flannery has spent decades in the outback. He knows what he's talking about when he asserts that reading the kangaroo's history in fossil formations is like reading, in distilled form, the story of the entire Australian continent. Flannery relishes "piecing together an ever-changing jigsaw" of environmental interdependencies, which are the essential underpinnings of Australia's unique ecosystem. The kangaroo's role in all this never ceases to fascinate: "So breathtakingly different is the kangaroo that if it did not exist we'd be unable to imagine it," he writes. Full of humor and self-deprecating honesty, this is a muscular memoir of one man's dedication to science, the enduring pleasure of the search, and the rush of discovery. For his tireless commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, Flannery was recently named by the National Australian Day Council "2007 Australian of the Year." Circling My Mother: A Memoir. Gordon, Mary. Pantheon. $24. ISBN 978-0375424564. Novelist turned memoirist Mary Gordon comes full circle as she comes to "re-cognize" (to know again) her late mother, Anne Gagaliano Gordon. One of five sisters born to an Irish mother and a Sicilian father, Anne was crippled by polio in early childhood and married late, at 39. A determined young woman in a pre-feminist era, college was not an option. Anne worked as a legal secretary (supporting first her parents, then a ne'er-do-well husband, and later, when widowed, her daughter and herself). Circling My Mother, while a personal journey, also captures a lost era of American Catholicism—the immigrant-dominated time before Vatican II. Anne's example helps to guide Gordon out of that tight rotation of church, work, and family. Gordon traveled from Queens, and her mother's middlebrow world of movies and musicals, to Barnard College, where agnosticism and divorce replaced the Rosary and making your "Easter Duty." This is Gordon's homage to her mother as well as to Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (Harcourt, 1957), both of which Gordon honors and transcends. How Doctors Think. Groopman, Jerome. Houghton. $26. ISBN 978-0618610037. Groopman, a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard Medical School faculty member, offers a cautionary review of the thinking processes practiced in the nation's leading medical schools and teaching hospitals. Groopman notes that "intellect and intuition, careful attention to detail, active listening, and psychological insight" are essential to effective diagnoses and successful patient care. Yet physicians all too often focus on the technical skills that constitute the science of doctoring while eschewing empathy, compassion, and communication—the art of medical practice. Groopman is concerned that a new "bottom-line" model of medical practice pressures physicians to see more patients in less time, and encourages doctors to take potentially dangerous medical shortcuts. What's the cure? The author advises doctors to rearrange their schedules in order to secure "think time"–the greatest luxury in today's medical care—while cautioning patients to stop assuming that doctors are infallible. Patients and doctors must strive to create an active partnership in health care, in which each partner learns to slow down, asks questions, and really, really listens. Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard. Lynch, Jack. Walker. $24.95. ISBN 978-0802715661. Lynch, a Rutgers English professor, doesn't begin this lively biography of William Shakespeare with his birth (1564) or even with his unremarkable death (1616), but rather with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. The English Civil War era (beginning in 1642) was not a particularly "entertainment-friendly" period, since Cromwell closed the theaters. When the Puritan's rule finally ended and theaters reopened, a lack of scripts was a real problem. Since Shakespeare had been popular, and there were many versions of his plays available, he was hastily resurrected and his metamorphosis into "The Bard of Avon" began. Since then, each era has actively reframed Shakespeare in its own image, and Lynch offers learned and wry insights on the history of performing, studying, improving, co-opting, domesticating, forging, and worshiping Shakespeare. For example: Did you know that in the early 19th century the brother and sister team of Thomas and Henrietta Maria Bowdler inaugurated their tidied-up versions of the classics with Shakespeare? Their bowdlerized Shakespeare carefully excised all blasphemy, references to sexual couplings and cuckolds, bodily parts, functions, and more—all told, about 10 percent of each play! Great fun for intrepid readers curious about how a "very competent playwright" was transformed into "a demigod." Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. Michaelis, David. Harper. $34.95. ISBN 978-0066213934. This biography of America's best known and most beloved cartoonist was greeted with prepublication outrage by Schulz's family, which guards its privacy as carefully as it manages the Peanuts brand. However, Michaelis, author of the masterful N. C. Wyeth: A Biography (Knopf, 1998), has broad enough shoulders to carry this disapproval. As Wyeth dominated the "Golden Age of American Illustration," so Schulz cast a long shadow over late-20th-century graphic arts. Few contemporary cartoonists exist outside his influence; Peanuts changed comics. In the giddy years of postwar consumerism, Schulz exposed the emotional vulnerabilities that bobbed above the suburban waterline. "Schulz reversed the American pattern of winners and losers, making a virtue of the fortitude required to endure blowing a hundred ball games in a row… in Peanuts the game was always lost, the football always snatched away… the pitcher did not just give up a line drive, he was stripped bare by it, exposed." Michaelis traces Schulz's melancholy journey from Depression-era Minneapolis through the army to the Art Instruction School (which advertised on the backs of matchbook covers) and on into the offices of powerful newspaper syndicates and TV producers. Sadly, though Schulz achieved undreamed-of success, the man who introduced the phrase "Happiness is a warm puppy" into American argot may never have achieved conventional happiness himself. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta. Mother Teresa. Collected and edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M C. Doubleday. $22.95. ISBN 978-0385520379. Icon? Saint? Fraud? Press responses to this glimpse into one woman's 50-plus-year battle with despair have ranged from a Time magazine cover story, a spot on Comedy Central's Colbert Report, and smug gloats from atheism's leading apologist, Christopher Hitchens. Collected and organized by Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa's "postulator" (an official advocate for elevation to Roman Catholic sainthood), these letters reveal an early mystical relationship with God that fueled her determination to leave the Irish Sisters of Loreto and found her own order, the Missionaries of Charity. Her new community would be dedicated to carrying "Christ into the homes and streets of the slums [among] the sick, the dying, the beggars and the little street children" of India. The successful expansion of the work of the Missionaries and the growing influence they exerted in India and around the world (acknowledged with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1979) was shockingly coterminous with Mother Teresa's spiritual aridity. "In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not really existing," she wrote. Dismissed by some as a simple woman of simplistic faith, these letters document the painful, powerful, lifelong journey of one woman's soul toward her God. Mother Teresa's greatest legacy may be as a "Saint of Darkness"—offering guideposts on the spiritual journey from despair to luminous hope. 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina. Rose, Chris. S & S. $15. ISBN 978-1416552987. Rose, a longtime New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist with a flair for the bon mot, was a must read for many who enjoyed his literate, smart-ass takes on the local music and culture scene. That was before "The Thing." Rose soon morphed into an eloquent and passionate chronicler of the physical and emotional toll Katrina took on New Orleans's survivors, evacuees, and ex-pats. 1 Dead in Attic takes its title from the hieroglyph spray painted on the front of 2214 St. Roch Avenue in the Eighth Ward. Inside was the body of Thomas Coleman, a retired longshoreman who died alone and abandoned. ("There were over one thousand like him," writes Rose.) This collection of columns runs from the last weekend of August 2005 until New Year's Day 2007. They are unsparing and brief dispatches of hope and love from the ruins of one of America's greatest cities, some so raw and revelatory that the author had become a self-described "New Orleans poster boy for post-traumatic stress." Rose reminds us that the losses of Katrina go far beyond the tangible (family, home, work) to include the loss of "peace of mind, security, serenity, [the] ability to concentrate, [and] notions of romance, sobriety, sanity, and hope." But despite it (or because of it), as residents struggle to reclaim their lives, there are gains: "a million little things, small victories, signs of living… desperate reaches to regain a sense of place, our place, our home, our time." The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Toobin, Jeffrey. Doubleday. $27.95. ISBN 978-0385516402. Toobin, CNN's senior legal analyst, has produced a revelatory, fast-paced take on the transformation of the often moderate and intermittently liberal Rehnquist Court into the solidly conservative and even right-wing Roberts Court. Toobin asserts that "the Court is a product of a democracy and represents, with sometimes chilling precision, the best and worst of the people." A Harvard Law School grad, Toobin has the political and constitutional law know-how to produce this standout work of investigative narrative. A practiced reporter, he secured hours of unattributable interviews with many of the justices—seasoned court watchers are speculating about whom—and cadres of past and present law clerks. Swing-voter Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, an uncelebrated proto-feminist pioneer, emerges as the book's central personality. Though clearly an O'Connor partisan, Toobin pulls no punches in a detailed review of her major role in the Court's decision on the 2000 Florida Recount. Each of the other justices are profiled (including the late Chief Justice Rehnquist) with varying degrees of candor and detail. Newly minted Chief Justice John Roberts emerges as a powerful and decisive personality; he is brilliant, strongly ideological, and very conservative. Looking to the future, Toobin advises readers that "one factor—and one factor only–will determine the future of the Supreme Court: the outcomes of presidential elections." The Court's decisions long outlast the goal and accomplishments of a particular presidency. So, no matter where you are on the political spectrum: vote. An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere. Walker, Gabrielle. Harcourt. $25. ISBN 978-0151011247. Air, opines Walker, is the "only shield that stands between vulnerable earthlings and the deadly environment of space." Air also makes life on Earth possible, and the greatest task of our nascent century may be to protect our fragile atmosphere from the tons of carbon being released into it, which united with oxygen form carbon dioxide. Walker, a trained chemist and former climate-change editor at the journal Nature, is a great storyteller. She explains scientific principles and complex theories with elegance and ease. Split into two parts ("Comfort Blanket" and "Sheltering Sky"), the narrative propels us through the history of the science of air, from the depths of our carbon-rich Earth to the thin edge of our fragile, protective atmosphere. Peopled with vivid characters, Walker's story includes both familiar names—Priestley, Lavoisier, and Marconi—and others likely to be new. One of the most fascinating chapters is "The Hole Story," which introduces Thomas Midgley (the unlucky inventor who first put lead in gasoline and developed chlorofluorocarbons) and the team of scientists whose Nobel Prize–winning research led to an international ban on chlorofluorocarbons. Read either straight through or piecemeal, this volume is chock-full of fascinating information on the Northern Lights, the ionosphere, radio waves, magnetic storms, solar winds and flares, hurricanes, and space exploration—just to name a few. By book's end, readers will agree that we "don't just live in the air. We live because of it."

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Author Information

Barbara Genco is director of collection development at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York.