Since his first baseball essay in 1962, Roger Angell of The New Yorker has become the game's pre-eminent writer. His romantic view of the national pastime has been often characterized as pompous (Harry Shearer, on his Now You See It DVD, wickedly sends Angell up), but his empathy and clear prose style made baseball writing safe for grownups.

Angell, who at age 85 looks and carries himself like a man 25 years younger, turns his attention from the ballpark to his own life in his new memoir, Let Me Finish. In this collection of short pieces (they feel more like essays than chapters of a book) Angell revisits his childhood, World War II service and beginnings as a writer. He was born into the profession; his mother, Katharine, was a New Yorker editor while his stepfather, "Andy," was Charlotte's Web author E.B. White.

White's Here Is New York (1949) has been embraced by readers as a longing look back at a bygone New York, and I suspect Let Me Finish will be similarly treasured for its tribute to an equally extinct culture. Here Angell recalls going to an afternoon Boston Symphony recital with a long-departed college classmate:

We had lunch somewhere off Beacon Street and were back in the sunshine in plenty of time before the overture, when Walker said, "Let's run." And away we went, a couple of twenty-year-old Harvard juniors in jackets and ties and narrow summer pants, leaping like deer across the Commonwealth Avenue traffic, hurdling hydrants, dodging in front of dowagers and startled pedestrians, our feet spattering down the red brick Boston sidewalks, our heads straining like Olympic sprinters. Laughter got the better of us and stopped us, wheezing sweaty, with our hands on our knees, a block or so short of Symphony Hall.

Angell has only kind words to say about his parents even after their tumultuous divorce, as well as his own late ex-wife, and his many colleagues at The New Yorker. You almost begin to long for some good old-fashioned score-settling, but no dice. "I've had a life sheltered by privilege and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck," he writes, and by the end of this book his gratitude is shared by the reader.

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel's childhood home was anything but fun. In Fun Home, her graphic memoir, the creator of the Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip relives her life as the very out daughter of a closeted English teacher cum funeral home director. "Relives" is the only word to describe Bechdel's process: To get everything just so, she took thousands of photos of herself in nearly every character's position, copied old letters and diary entries, and delved back into the books that she and her father bonded over: Joyce, Fitzgerald, Proust. She even took pictures of trucks as they traced the path of the one that killed her dad.

But for all her precision in chasing memories from more than two decades ago, Bechdel has a lot of uncertainty. She's pretty sure her dad intentionally jumped in front of the truck — he'd been busted for corrupting minors and her mother was seeking a divorce — but there's no suicide note. In a man whose sense of self was bound in the written word, that omission casts just enough doubt to endow a solitary ending with alternate meanings. But when Bechdel tries to imagine what would have happened if he hadn't gotten in the truck's way, all she can come up with is a feeling that her dad would have contracted AIDS, and maybe passed it on to her mom.

There are a million maybes down that road, and Bechdel dances around them. Her story isn't linear but a Mobius strip. In her retelling, she's a child, a teen, an adult — not necessarily in that order. Father and daughter are gripping on their own; add in their sad family, a few beautiful teenage boys and Bechdel's first lovers, and you've got something rich, moving, lovely and fascinating. It's not fun. But it's everything else.

"An all-too-rare description of the real business of cooking," chef Anthony Bourdain writes in his back-of-jacket blurb for the new food book by New Yorker writer Bill Buford. One of those few other books Bourdain is referring to is his own 5-star memoir, Kitchen Confidential, and comparing the two is like pitting amateur chef Buford against Bourdain in an Iron Chef competition. Buford is bound to lose.

Early press for Heat described it as a biography of Food Channel chef Mario Batali, informed by Buford's days toiling as a kitchen "slave" at Batali's three-star New York restaurant, Babbo. You get the feeling that's all this book was going to be until Buford discovered that a chef of Batali's celebrity is rarely in his kitchen, and that some of the people Batali trained with in Italy are even more interesting. As much as I'd rather read about a Dante-quoting butcher than another one of Batali's drinking sprees, the switch makes Heat's structure and aims as complicated as one of Batali's over-the-top dishes.

There is also the built-in banality of the line chef job Buford has decided to George Plimptonize, resulting in way too many descriptions of the perfect way to cut a carrot or cut a piece of meat. (Could that be why NBC's The Restaurant is now only a memory?)

Heat does contain some of the same ingredients that made KC such an entertaining read — anecdotes about the bad behavior of culinary artistes that are the main source of this book's title, for instance. (South Philly has the dubious distinction of producing one of the book's most abusive characters, a supervising chef who throws hot food at the author when he messes up.) Buford's kitchen stint also yields some interesting insider information and insights — about the illegal immigrants without which no big-city restaurant could survive, about "kitchen awareness" (the instinct, say, for when something is done, timer be damned), about the difference between amateur and professional chefs (pros "push" the food to the limits of cooking times, seasonings, etc. and so get much more intense flavor — although Buford admits he cribbed this idea from old episodes of Molto Mario).

But frankly there are many more such insights in Kitchen Confidential, which is also funnier and better written. Heat will leave fans of both Bourdain and Batali hungry and cold.

Augusten Burroughs may have made his name — and his fame — with his bestselling book Running with Scissors, but his latest essay collection, Possible Side Effects, should catapult him to the top of the list of popular navel-gazing humorists/ memoirists (David Sedaris, Jonathan Ames, etc.). Burroughs' perceptive chronicle of his adult and childhood experiences is both poignant and self-deprecating — and best of all, it is laugh-out-loud funny.

In every chapter, the author captures the exactly right — and almost always unexpected — response to one of his actions, the so-called "side effect" of the title (nicely illustrated by Chip Kidd's jacket featuring a six-fingered hand). For example, when he helps his lesbian friend go all out looking for a date, it is amusing but cringe-inducing when she takes his advice too far, but Burrough's cockeyed optimism wins out. And when he helps his friend Debbie display pornographic signs to get back at bad drivers on the highways, the book is absolutely hilarious.

Yet Burroughs is not against presenting himself in a bad light. Part of what makes Possible Side Effects so affecting is the author's willingness to admit to his faults and flaws. He is not ashamed to discuss his alcoholism, and he practically boasts about his awful diet (McDonald's). His slovenly appearance and messy apartment are mentioned (when he gets locked out), and his lifelong selfishness and chronic bleeding from the fingers and nose cause him grief at book signings or on planes.

But what is most engaging about the stories collected here is the prismatic effect of entering Burroughs' life. He includes three distinct episodes involving wanting a pet, and how he handled each one with varying degrees of success. As readers piece together the author's experiences a moving composite of his life forms. Such is the strength of this remarkable collection.

Droll travel writer Will Ferguson walks an uneasy line between respect and mockery, between reverence toward his surroundings and, well, being an obnoxious Western-centric jackass. Hitching Rides With Buddha is his account of thumbing trips from the south of Japan to its northernmost trip, following the seasonal blooming of cherry trees as it traverses the island. Sake'd up at a faculty party while teaching high school English in the Amakusa Islands, Ferguson drunkenly proclaims his intentions to follow the "Cherry Blossom Front." The next morning he has no memory of this boast, but his enthralled supervisors do, cheerily sending him on his way. The book unfolds episodically from city to city and car ride to car ride as Ferguson deftly weaves rich tidbits about Japanese history, geography, religion and culture into oft-hysterical anecdotes about being the tall white guy with his thumb out at roadside.

Don't be mistaken; Hitching Rides is a very, very funny book. Ferguson's voice owes much to the snarky travel commentary popularized by Bill Bryson, except with less of a crotchety-old-man perspective. But at the same time, his observations tend to belittle his hosts and their way of life; their civic and cultural pride (he teasingly mentions every time someone calls anything in their homeland "number-one!"), their fascination with the West. (Much is made of people's insistence on referring to him as "American," even though he's from Canada.) You almost want to smack the guy, until he relates some story that mends all wounds. A moving passage describes his night spent with a family in Kanazawa whose patriarch — a tortured old veteran of the Japanese military — survived a WWII prison camp. Elsewhere, a young man takes him to see castles that are no longer standing, exhibiting a deep connection with what once was. Even Ferguson's assessment of the language mishmash he calls "Englese" is right on — mockery or not, T-shirt slogans like "We can't be born special: Be my power present international!" are damn funny. At one point, the author says, "In Japan, the movement from Tourist to Exile to Insider is one that ends at Exile. There is no final step inside." But Ferguson takes us closer in than he gives himself credit for. If it wasn't so harshly lampooning, Hitching Rides could be tremendously deep.

If Jane Austen and Charles Dickens had been able to collaborate on a huge, lusty novel of mid-Victorian life, it probably would have been something like The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, a biography that reads like fiction. In Britain Beeton's name is synonymous with household arts ranging from cookery to manners. We've had similar American domestic icons, but like Betty Crocker (at least until Martha) they were not real people.

Isabella Mayson was a very real woman. She married ambitious young publisher Sam Beeton when she was barely 20 years old. At age 25, she published the book that made her a household name under her husband's imprint, Beeton's Book of Household Management. As a journalist, she'd patched together everything from what to pay servants to why free-range chicken is best. Three years later, she died of syphilis, a wedding present from Sam. Every day of her short life, Isabella was a working journalist, churning out household advice books, writing columns and editing a fashion magazine. Thanks to the enterprising Sam, her name lived on with new books by Mrs. Beeton appearing to this day (most recently microwaving).

Still, no one really knew much about the real Mrs. Beeton. Several prominent writers wanted to do biographies, but the family was cautious. Later generations had been knighted and they wanted to protect Sam, not just about the syphilis but also his reputation as a publishing rascal, suing people right and left, and late in life (also a short one) publishing questionable material like pornography (which sold very well).

Author Kathryn Hughes has brought Mrs. Beeton out of the shadows in an unbelievably well-documented biography, not just about Isabella but the whole Victorian era. Don't be daunted by the size. Yes, this is a serious work, but it's also a page-turner!

Lyme disease put Steven Kotler in bed for two years, and surfing pulled him out. His journey from bedridden to surfing Hawaii's Banzai Pipeline is what makes up the bulk of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief. But this isn't a cheerleading, you-can-do-it! kind of book. Kotler, a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared in Discover, GQ, Men's Journal and Wired, where parts of the book first appeared, takes his journalistic pen to the topic of surfing and himself, and with more than a few hat tips to Hunter S. Thompson, includes heavy doses of drinking, cursing and snark.

Loosely, Kotler hunts for the origins of the Conductor myth, which is about a man who controls the weather, and therefore the surf. Kotler heard the story on two continents and is determined to track down its origins, which takes him from his home in California to Mexico to Bali to New Zealand. He's not a surfing newbie, but the myth and the need to get on with his life push him to become a better surfer.

Mixed in with his tracking and travels are jaunts about mysticism, adrenaline, surf movies, Australians, near-death experiences and more about Lyme disease, which is sometimes so severe that he forgets how to make coffee or work his computer.

The tangents are interesting as trivia, though they can drag. It's in the surf writing where Kotler's imagery and humor shine. Of a large wave, he writes, "it looks about the size of a house. Most people, when they find themselves directly in the path of a moving house, have an instinctual get-me-the-hell-out-of-here response. If you can ignore that response, you turn around and paddle." If you've never surfed, you can still enjoy West of Jesus, though be warned: It might inspire you to pick up a short board. For serious surfers, it's a must for in between riding waves — though never leave the water while the surf is still good. You don't want to piss off the Conductor.

During a Reds-Phillies game in Philadelphia in September 1900, the Reds noticed the Phillies' third base coach standing in a puddle in his coach's box. Cincinnati captain Tommy Corcoran went over and began digging his foot into the ground, uncovering a wooden board and what the Inquirer called "a little telegraphic instrument." Apparently the Phils had rigged it from the third base box to the outfield clubhouse where veteran Phillie Morgan Murphy would see the opposing catcher's hand signals to the pitcher and buzz to the third base coach, who would then tip off the Phillies' batters. "This may be honest base ball [sic]," the Inquirer concluded, "but the general public has nothing but contempt for people who play with marked cards."

The above is one of literally hundreds of wonderful baseball anecdotes to be found in Peter Morris' new A Game of Inches, a comprehensive volume of who-did-what-first adding a necessary human dimension to baseball facts and figures. We find that the batting helmet was introduced by New York Giants' catcher Roger Bresnahan after a 1907 beaning. The jockstrap was first marketed in the 1880s ("The identity of the first baseball player to wear one is unknown," Morris writes, "and perhaps that's just as well"). The book illustrates how many of today's near-sacred baseball traditions began as blasphemies. "If the club batting last was ahead after eight and a half innings," Morris writes, "it wouldn't have occurred to early players not to complete the game. After all, a baseball match was a ceremony rather than a competition, and for the losers to walk off the field would be the ultimate act of poor sportsmanship." After the National League passed a rule change in 1879, the "walkoff" hit was born.

Morris quotes from scores of old newspaper articles and his bibliography includes over 250 books. While it's enough of an accomplishment to simply accumulate all this data, it's even more impressive that Morris has organized and presented this information in such an appealing manner (this summer he's publishing a follow-up volume on off-field innovations). Along with last year's award-winning Baseball Before We Knew It by David Block, A Game of Inches will change how countless fans think about the earliest moments of baseball history.

In order to write this book, British scribe Geoff Nicholson amassed dozens of interviews, hundreds of pages of handwritten notes and scores of photographs. Does his fussy (albeit admittedly incomplete) cataloging of erotologists' lifeblood make him something of a "sex collector" himself? It's a question Nicholson wrestles with early in his research, and one that ultimately reduces him to masturbatory elucidation. Lauded for his tragicomic weirdness and kinky prolix (see 1997's Bleeding London and 1995's Footsucker), there couldn't have been a better guy for the job. But with his pervs-are-people-too whitewashing and fan-boy reverence for the moneyed neurots and eBaying dilettantes behind the relatively unsexy spoils (lithographs of nuns getting — and going — down, barbed-wire dildos, handwritten notes from the Marquis de Sade, naked Homer Simpson dolls, etc.) Nicholson's big-picture revelations are lost in the "humanizing" of it all. Motivation becomes as measurable as each object's worth, and Nicholson's investment as tedious to outsiders as the old man up the street collecting bottle caps.

Political operative David Sirota has two things going for him: facts and fury. What he doesn't have is subtlety or storytelling skills. Given Hostile Takeover's bulk of regurgitated data, he might want to rethink his stance on the so-called lazy, dumb, biased media whores whose work he constantly cites in lieu of primary research. Despite the nearly 1,400 endnotes, his anecdotes are maddeningly vague. He'll occasionally pause to repeat an especially galling statistic, but when it comes to details, things get fuzzy: "some Democrats," "one political strategist," "a magazine." And trips to the back of the book aren't necessarily edifying unless you find yourself in a library stocked with obscure periodicals.

Sirota's attempts at levity fall flat; he beats a Matrix metaphor into the ground in the introduction, only to pick it up again just in time for the conclusion 275 pages later. He drones on for dozens of pages, then randomly drops references to The A-Team and Mitch Williams in consecutive sentences. He likes to point out conflicts of interest and never misses a chance to call attention to the Cato Institute's corporate funding, but he casts himself as an ordinary, if outraged, citizen rather than a political insider. It's not that he's hiding his ties — they're prominently mentioned on the dust jacket — but it's slightly unseemly to toast Bernie Sanders and Brian Schweitzer as heroes without acknowledging his role in shaping their messages. After all, Hostile Takeover's not for trainspotters, Sirota points out, but a practical guide for the people.

Its shortcomings are a shame, because Sirota's points, while hardly new, bear repeating. Corporate lobbyists and their congressional lapdogs have made a mess of things. Executive compensation is way out of line. Health insurance is a scam. The energy industry is morally bankrupt. The pharmaceutical industry is morally bankrupt. The banking industry is morally bankrupt. Citizens should demand more of their representatives. True enough. But the facts speak for themselves. Sirota's righteous fury just gets in the way.

Cross Country is about one trip across the United States, specifically Robert Sullivan's as he drives from Oregon to New York with his wife and two kids in a rented Impala. But, like any road trip, he gets sidetracked. Sullivan has crossed the country by car more than two dozen times, starting when his wife was his girlfriend, which he believes makes him an amateur expert on the topic. So he breaks to stories of past Sullivan family road trips and throws in essays about the kinds of topics you'll cross while crossing the country, like Evel Knievel, coffee lids, Holiday Inns, beat poets, the true inspiration of Cannonball Run, falling asleep behind the wheel and a lot about how America became a country chewed up by interstate highways. Sullivan gives just enough information for the topic to stay interesting before moving on to the next subject on the dashboard horizon. He writes at length about Lewis and Clark, whose return trip the Sullivans follow for part of their journey, and he stops along the way to visit key Lewis and Clark landmarks, even if his family isn't as jazzed about eating lunch at Lewis and Clark's: An American Restaurant and Public House as he is.

If the call of the open road is your siren, you'll enjoy Cross Country. But if you can't tell the difference between Lewis and Lois and Clark and tend to shutter your ears with your iPod on long trips, Sullivan can sound like an overenthusiastic dad trying to chat the boredom out of sitting in a car for hours, which, in fact, is what he really is. Sometimes it's endearing, sometimes annoying, but that's what driving across the country with your family is all about.

If you're an antiquing addict, you've probably heard of Brimfield. A vast composite of garage sales, Woodstock and Antiques Roadshow, The Brimfield Antiques and Collectibles Show in Brimfield, Mass., is the largest outdoor event of its type in the world. It's a mecca for (Wyss says 3,000, but today's Web site says 5,000) dealers as well as collectors, bargain hunters and a sprinkling of swindlers and thieves.

Journalist Wyss tells the backstory, behind-the-scenes gossip, and communicates the excitement of "The Brimfield Rush," a legendary pre-dawn charge of eager dealers who surge onto transformed fields like Heart-o-the-Mart and Dealer's Choice seeking treasures, many of which will be "flipped" (immediately resold) at a profit.

Three annual meetings begin on the second Tuesdays of May, July and December. Wyss researched Brimfield for three years and followed the adventures of a handful of regulars. In particular, the fortunes of Pennsylvanians Joe Laskowski and Rachel McKay drive Wyss' exposition. Joe and Rachel are a couple, each of whom collects and sells paintings, prints and illustrations by regional B-list artists whose work is appreciating and, even now, can fetch thousands of dollars. They specialize in different artists and have different styles of dealing, but individually and collectively risk almost everything on art. At Rachel's lowest point, she can't afford an emergency root canal because there's no way to realize an immediate profit on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in paintings she owns.

Wyss treats the romance between Rachel and Joe more superficially than the reader might hope. Though they plan a wedding by the end of the book, their passion for art seems stronger than their feelings for one another. Still, a parade of engaging characters, from Joel Schiff, the fanatical one-legged collector of cast iron, to media pets like the Keno twins, keep us reading.

The many people and institutions from the Philadelphia area include Rachel's beloved Philadelphia Ten (actually more than 10 women painters); Maxfield Parrish; a secretive Philadelphia map collector who found a $2.42 million copy of the Declaration of Independence; realtor Howard Roberts, who has located many treasures; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Samuel T. Freeman & Co. Auction Gallery. Wyss is not a scintillating writer and photographs would have been a plus, but Brimfield Rush is still a perfect summer read on your way to the show: this year July 11Ð16.

There are few reasons to pay any heed to Toby Young's second memoir, The Sound of No Hands Clapping. Young is all of 42 years old and, yes, you read it right, this is his second memoir. Unless you're a first-person prodigy along the lines of Mark Twain or David Sedaris, is there any justifiable reason to have two memoirs at this age? Surely exceptions can be made for those reared by paraplegic kangaroos, but Mr. Young's jumpiness is not the result of marsupial lineage.

Other reasons not to like Young: He's as vapid and fame-hungry as the cast of a thousand Real World vs. Road Rules. And the critical eye he deftly turns on pop culture, marriage, sex and relationships, all fly out the window when it comes to his insatiable need for recognition, especially from the entertainment industry.

It's a need that in his first memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, quickened his fall from the seemingly enviable perch of Vanity Fair magazine, where he invariably upset big-name brand stars. Years later, married and returned to London, his gaze is fixed on the Hollywood film business. Working for a Very Powerful Producer whose name he can't mention for legal reasons, Young busies himself adapting a work of nonfiction about a legendary disco-era record producer into a script. Only it never quite takes and, at risk of being reductive, drama ensues.

At the same time Young has become a father while holding down a day job he fesses to being ill-suited for: theater critic. None of this is exciting, mind you, but the thing about Young is that despite the many reasons to dislike him, he is genuinely funny and charming. Sure, his his self-deprecation grows shticky, and his uncanny ability to make an ass of himself is suspect if only due to its almost preternatural frequency. But the funny manages to cancel out the megalomania.

Young is almost like a literary British Eminem. I'm thinking of the latter's rhyme about how he's "cursed to just blurt" and Young does just that. Gaffing and sputtering and sticking his foot in his mouth so often he might as well get kiwi-flavored toothpaste. And yet, it works. Don't ask why, just read.