Sept. 29 - There are famous names in the memoirs and biographies reviewed here — Lucille Ball and Ronald Reagan, for two. But other books offer fascinating looks at everyday types — a candy-lover, an art dealer, a rancher. Turns out you don’t have to be a superstar to tell a compelling story.

TO YOUR HEALTH

JANE STERN HAD what many Americans consider a dream job. With husband Michael, she traveled around the country tasting and writing about what the Sterns call Roadfood, the tasty fare coming out of the burger joints and BBQ shacks that dot this country. Their work appears in Gourmet and the New Yorker magazines. Yet inside, Stern was a churning mess of anxiety, depression and hypochondria, all of which were taking their toll on the Sterns’ 30-year marriage.

‘I would take the thing I most dreaded, illness and death, and immerse myself in it. If it didn’t kill me, maybe it would cure me.’ — JANE STERN

Where some would turn to drugs or alcohol, Stern turned to something else entirely: She decided to become an emergency medical technician. “I would take the thing I most dreaded, illness and death, and immerse myself in it. If it didn’t kill me, maybe it would cure me.” It was hardly the expected choice for an overweight, out of shape woman in her 50s. In “Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT” (Crown Publishing, $23), readers feel Stern’s pain as she huffs through 140 hours of training, at one point carrying a 250-pound man down three flights of stairs. She meets with frustration and embarrassment seemingly at every turn, yet she never gives up.

Being an EMT is inherently dramatic, but Stern lets readers see the humor in her ambulance calls too. Her writing is simple and direct, and it’s hard not to like her, warts and all. And it’s harder still not to put down the book feeling inspired by her triumph. —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

LOVING LUCY

“Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball” by Stefan Kanfer, (Knopf, $25.95) is a thorough biography of America’s favorite redhead and her not-so-perfect life. Ball lost her father at age four, and her early life was wracked with insecurity and sorrow. Things started looking up in 1939 once she met a handsome Cuban drummer named Desi Arnaz. Eventually, the two would own their own studio, Desilu (Ball was the first woman to do so). Desilu went on to give life to such classics as “Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible.”

What do you do after your biggest hit is over? And what about when the dream marriage onscreen is a disaster offscreen?

But they will always be remembered best as the Ricardos, hanging out with Fred and Ethel Mertz, raising little Ricky, and with Lucy always trying to get into Ricky’s show. The problems with that were twofold: What do you do after your biggest hit is over? And what about when the dream marriage onscreen is a disaster offscreen?

Ball is a biographer’s dream — much of her life is captured on film, and although she and Arnaz are both gone, there are still plenty of Hollywood types around who remember working with them. And the parallels of Lucy Ricardo and Lucille Ball are a juicy theme to tackle.

Yet Kanfer’s book feels in parts as if he is relying on already published accounts. And one of the major questions fans have about Ball’s life is never answered: Why did her marriage crumble, especially since later both of them professed to love each other all their lives? It’s not the biographer’s job to answer that question completely, but more clues would be helpful. —G.F.C.

BREATH OF LIFE

A week after I finished reading “Breathing for a Living: A Memoir” by Laura Rothenberg (Hyperion Press, $22.95), I lost a family friend to the same chronic disease she battled all of her 22 years — cystic fibrosis. The chronic disease clogs a person’s airways with thick mucus. To breathe normally, to live life and fight its battles outside of a hospital bed, these are the simple, unreachable dreams of Rothenberg’s young life. “There are still globs of green gunk in my lings, still arthritic knees, still low-density bones, still a pancreas that doesn’t work,” she writes.

To breathe normally, to live life and fight its battles outside of a hospital bed, these are the simple, unreachable dreams of Rothenberg’s young life.

Rothenberg longs to return to Brown University to live the life of a healthy young woman, but it’s as if CF has her on a rubber band, continually yanking her back into the hospital. If the book builds towards anything, it’s the lung transplant that Rothenberg waits for. But the book doesn’t end happily as she sails off into the sunset with her new organs. Instead, her lung function soars to 95%, then starts to slide. She can’t stop vomiting. She must have surgery to correct a bowel obstruction. “Enough, I say, enough,” she writes. “What’s the price I have to pay for being given these lungs?”

Rothenberg doesn’t sit the reader down in chapter one and lay out the details of her disease, they come out gradually, as they affect her. This makes for a more natural progression, but it also leaves holes in the average reader’s understanding of CF.

The book wanders, and even at the end, feels unfinished. Rothenberg added a short epilogue, but missing is the epilogue the readers really need, the one that explains what they must read later on the Internet, that Rothenberg never lived to see her memoir published. Her book is not perfect, but it still stands as a moving testament to the preciousness of life. —G.F.C.

SUGAR, SUGAR

The first thing you need to know about “Candy and Me,” by Hilary Liftin (Free Press, $22) is that “candy” is not a pet name for a lover: this woman has been mainlining sweets since she was old enough to swipe powdered sugar from her mother’s cupboard. Candy is candy, and this is no roman à clef; Liftin names names. Snickers, Fireballs, Junior Mints: your teeth will ache pleasantly as you read.

Her childhood bedroom is like an isolation ward from her peers, but at least her prison is stocked with Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Like many writers of her generation, Liftin is skipping her autobiographical first novel and presenting us with simple autobiography. Liftin’s does have a tasty hook, her unquenchable appetite for Bottle Caps and her appetite for acceptance making a neat parallel.

Her childhood bedroom is like an isolation ward from her peers, but at least her prison is stocked with Cadbury Creme Eggs. As Liftin grows older, though, the tone becomes uneven, and a few orphaned digressions feel distracting. She uses, to excess, the exclamation point to demonstrate when she is trying to make a funny.

In the same manner that a preadolescent Liftin eats an entire pound of candy corn every day in October, so does one compulsively tear through the pages of her memoir, consuming 30 years of her life in a single sitting. Like cotton candy, it is pretty and palatable but dissolves almost immediately. The endnotes list confectioners’ shops and Web sites, and the prose lavished on certain sweets looks, in light of this, less akin to love letter than product placement. —Kim Rollins

ART OF THE DEAL

In “I Bought Andy Warhol” (Harry N. Abrams, $24.95) dealer Richard Polsky guides us through the blue-chip art market of the ’80s and ’90s — an arena as image-oriented and cutthroat as a Texan cheerleading competition. The story appears at its outset to be about the singular pursuit of the perfect Warhol for Polsky’s own collection (ending in his acquisition of the green “Fright Wig” self-portrait depicted on the dust jacket), but this mission is not a linear one. Polsky strays entertainingly far afield of his ostensible subject.

One of the book’s strengths is that the author is not self-aggrandizing, and doesn’t mind sharing anecdotes where he’s the butt of the joke — sometimes literally, as in one story about his pilgrimage to Jackson Pollock’s Hamptons studio, where Polsky relishes the illicit thrill of sitting on the great artist’s former toilet seat. He cheerfully admits his complicity in the ridiculousness of it all. Noting his father’s reaction to witnessing a $75,000 sale go down after a few minutes spent being scooted around a warehouse in a wheeled office chair by a representative of the Warhol estate, Polsky dryly writes: “You could tell he was unsure of whether this was some sort of game or if this was really how I conducted my business. Actually, it was both.”

Some of the tales strain credulity: a food fight at the Corcoran Gallery, a collector who randomly hangs out at LAX just to see who’s coming into the city. Then again, if the figure of Warhol himself were fictional, we would scarcely find him realistically drawn. An eccentric genius whose most well-known work is a reproduction of a twenty-nine cent soup can . . . and who once made a guest appearance on “The Love Boat”? —K.R.

Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in the spring of 2002, was a symbol to many. To his murderers, he was a symbol of America, and of Jews everywhere. To a horrified world, he was a symbol of innocence attacked, of the bloody new boundaries of the world after Sept. 11. But to his wife Mariane, he was simply Danny, her beloved husband and the father of her son, Adam, who was not yet born when his father was killed.

Danny Pearl was pushing the Journal to keep close tabs on war-zone correspondents, even submitting a document titled ‘Memo on Protection of Journalists.’ (It was not adopted.)

It’s hard to pick up “A Mighty Heart,” (Scribner, $25) Mariane Pearl’s memoir of that horrible month. Pearl’s death was so horrible, so visible, that it seems as if the book can only relate agony and misery. But if Mariane Pearl is strong enough to write it, perhaps it is wrong not to feel strong enough to read it.

In these pages, Danny comes alive as a young husband and father-to-be with a big heart and a ready smile. In every airport, his wife tells us, he would stock up on candy, not for himself, but instead for the children of people he was about to meet. After he is kidnapped she comes across a list on his Palm Pilot titled “things I love about Mariane” (included: “Plays Led Zep in the morning”). And he was pushing the Journal to keep close tabs on war-zone correspondents, even submitting a document titled “Memo on Protection of Journalists.” (It was not adopted.)

Once Danny is kidnapped, Mariane finds strength in “Captain,” the chief of Pakistani counterterrorism, a memorable character who even today pledges to bring her husband’s murderers to justice. Far along in her first pregnancy, she must see photos of her husband with a gun to his head. And eventually, all learn the devastating truth: That Danny will never return to his wife, never meet his son.

“A Mighty Heart” is a loving tribute to a life unfairly ended far too soon. Although it is never easy to read, it is an important record of an unreal time. The back cover photo of a smiling Mariane holding her giggling son is a reminder that Danny Pearl’s spirit lives on. —G.F.C.

SADDLE UP

One of the photos on the cover of “The Secret Life of Cowboys” by Tom Groneberg (Scribner, $24) shows a cowboy, in boots and hat, reaching in to the freezer door of a supermarket, a blue plastic cart behind him. It’s a long way from riding the range. The contrast — the ultimate outdoorsman trapped under fluorescent lights on gleaming tile — perfectly illustrates the book’s title. Unfortunately, it doesn’t illustrate the book’s content. “The Not So Secret Life of One Yuppie Wannabe Cowboy” would be a more accurate title.

Groneberg says of himself that he “was born in the suburbs of Chicago and 22 years later, grew up in the West.” He answered an ad in the Utne Reader (wha?) advertising “hard work with horses in a beautiful setting.” Turned out it was a job as a dude ranch guide in Breckenridge, Colo. He spent a short time there, then moved on to other ranch jobs in Montana, and then with his parents’ help, bought an 9,600-acre ranch with his wife.

By switching from city slicker to rancher, Groneberg is obviously fulfilling his dream. (No mention is made of any dreams his wife might have, except, eventually, having a baby.) He’s certainly lyrical about the Western life, saying at one point “the ranch is life and death balancing in this grass and sky.” Yet it’s never really clear why he chose this life — he doesn’t seem to have a huge love for animals, or, poetic language aside, even for the land. The book is more of a diary of Groneberg’s everyday life than an insight into the cowboy world.

Groneberg had a great opportunity as a wordsmith transplanted into a subculture full of amazing stories, rarely told. It’s a shame he didn’t produce a richer book. —G.F.C.

IN HIS OWN WRITE

So much of Ronald Reagan’s life — as actor, governor, and president — was played out on a very public stage. But much of his communication was carried out in private correspondence, much of it unseen until now. Reagan has written as many as 10,000 letters in his life, and the editors of “Reagan : A Life in Letters” (edited and with an introduction by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, Free Press, $35) had access to more than half of them. They note that in 1994, when Reagan announced to the world that he had Alzheimer’s disease, “he might have used television or radio, but instead he said goodbye in a letter.”

In 1994, when Reagan announced to the world that he had Alzheimer’s disease, ‘he might have used television or radio, but instead he said goodbye in a letter.’

The book begins with a hilarious-in-retrospect letter from an 11-year-old Reagan to a high-school age friend, which includes “Oh the little kids are having recess now and theres a fight. I will have to wait and see the fight. well. It’s 5 min later and the fights over.”

It moves on to share letters sent to his children, to old friends (Charlton Heston gets a couple), to citizens who took the time to send their thoughts to Reagan as president.

Don’t look for love letters to his wife Nancy; those are already collected in another book. But his love for her still shines through, as in a letter where he tells daughter Patti “I’m counting on you to take care of Mommie and keep her safe for me because there wouldn’t be any moon or stars in the sky without her.”

The book pushes 900 pages, but is divided into sections, so those only interested, for example, in presidential letters or writings about the Cold War can find those easily.

A book of letters can only be as fascinating as the person writing them. Plainspoken and enthusiastic, Reagan’s writing, even in formal occasions, is never stiff and removed. Whatever you think of his politics, he has the perfect personality for this kind of collection. —G.F.C.

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