True Confessions

The whole point of summer vacation is doing nothing, or as close to it as possible. Stretching out full-length on scorching sand, a sighing emerald lawn, a porch swing, a deck chair, a chaise longue, rearranging knees and elbows to find the best pose for turning pages with one hand while holding a glass or a bottle with the other: That about marks the apex of ambition once the summer clock starts ticking. And when you're languid, lying perfectly still under a huge sky on one of those vast, dilated days that linger way past dinnertime, what bigger frisson is there than reading about other people rushing around having wild adventures and deep epiphanies all over the world?

It's a counterpoint thing. The more placidly motionless the reader, the more impact all that vicarious action packs. And vicarious action, subtle or speedy, from pursuing gurus to dodging bullets to sidestepping the SS, is even more rewarding if you know for sure that it actually happened to someone somewhere.

This season, hot new adventure memoirs are stacking up. Don't confuse these with those stolid old standbys, the recollections of icons whose entrenched, in-the-bag fame hoists their books above the status of mere memoir to full-on autobiography, with all that implicit extra dignity and instant best-sellerdom and waiting lists at the library. The otherClinton autobiography will be upon us soon enough.

Rather, the zeitgeist right now is for titillating memoirs by authors you've never heard of, more or less regular Joes and Janes who are, in this celebrity-driven world, near nobodies. Doctors. Lawyers. Reporters. Grad students. Moms. No one you'd notice in the checkout line or in the adjacent Camry stopped at the light. But they've done things. Weird things. Funny things. Dumb and dangerous things that have rendered them accidental sages, surprised survivors, dispatchers from heaven and hell.

Matthew McAllester dispatched for years, but filing news reports from war zones around the world, he never expected that his biggest scoop would be about himself. Last year, just as war broke out in Iraq, the Newsday reporter was arrested with several other journalists in a Baghdad hotel. In Blinded by the Sunlight, he recounts their chilling week of captivity, interrogation and terrifying mind games in Saddam's most notorious prison. The book's title is a bit of a misnomer -- McAllester records every detail, even while blindfolded.

War gets you thinking about ... well, about war. In At the Abyss, former Secretary of the Air Force Thomas C. Reed offers an insider's view of those duck-and-cover decades now remembered with a shudder as the Cold War. Reed, who worked under Reagan and the first Bush, writes about his life among spies, bombs and world leaders with an irresistible, unexpectedly wry wit that humanizes this long but -- as international crises go -- only relatively lethal conflict. In the process, he makes no bones about how close we were to being vaporized.

But a far cry from world affairs is Kat Albrecht's The Lost Pet Chronicles, a warm and fuzzy narrative about an animal-adoring California cop who bought herself a few cute puppies and turned them into highly skilled search dogs. After years spent hunting with them for missing humans, Albrecht had a bolt from the blue: Why not use animals to hunt for missing animals? These chronicles of her highs and lows as a certified pet detective might make dog- and catless readers' eyes glaze over now and then, but die-hard animal lovers will relish Albrecht's tales of suburban search-and-rescues, sad little stiff corpses and joyous reunions, intercut with insights on raising bloodhounds at home. (They're smart and lovable and exude saliva incessantly.)

We don't like to think of doctors as having lives. If they have lives -- lovers, cranky kids who keep them up all night, ailments of their own -- then that bodes really poorly for their concentration, and that is the only part of them we wish to think about. Emergency-room physician Frank Huyler breaks down that professional wall of silence in The Blood of Strangers. This memoir-in-essays' title says it all, baring the heart and soul of a man who, in the course of a typical work shift, watches a beautiful girl bleed to death, laughs bitterly at a fellow medic's joke about broken jaws and blow jobs, sees colleagues slipping over the edge, stops a child from slipping into a coma, and saves a wounded murderer's life. What goes on behind that surgical mask? Maybe more than you want to know, but as both a published poet and a wielder of scalpels, Huyler gives it to you straight and stunningly.

Many of these authors are so ordinary, so much like us and those we know, that we slide into their shoes effortlessly, automatically, as they walk on the wild side. It's a far cry from the way we fawn and genuflect our way through the reminiscences of, say, Hillary Clinton or Maya Angelou. Within the moments it takes to skim a single paragraph of this new type of memoir, we love or hate the author, envy or identify with the author, imagine being the author but also shudder with relief at not having actually had to be there. A cool trick.