BOOK REVIEW : Quest for the Secret of Heroism Ends Happily : RESCUES; The Lives of Heroes <i> by Michael Lesy </i> Farrar Straus Giroux $17.95, 214 pages

Curiosity about what makes ordinary men and women into heroes is what moved Michael Lesy to write “Rescues,” an account of nine mostly obscure men and women who distinguished themselves by their deeds of valor and sacrifice. To hear Lesy tell it, however, his search for the secret of heroism is nothing less than a lifelong quest.

Lesy recalls the precise moment when, as a 13-year-old boy, the stirring words of a hymn--”Then it is the brave man chooses/While the coward stands aside”--were driven into his heart “like a wedge into green wood.” Only now, in “Rescues,” is Lesy able “to reach around and pull the wedge . . . out of my own back.”

Lesy has distinguished himself as an acute observer of the American ways of life and death in several memorable books, including “Wisconsin Death Trip,” “Visible Light” and “The Forbidden Zone.” Here, he is more nearly a hagiographer: Lesy perceives saint-like qualities in his heroes, and there is nearly always a moment of epiphany in their acts of heroism.

Two of the heroes in “Rescues” are soldiers whose exploits in battle earned them Medals of Honor. Two more are young men who came to the rescue of crime victims at grave risk to themselves.

There’s an extended profile of Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, and three less conventional heroes: a man who overcame polio to become an advocate for the rights of the disabled, a black man who placed himself in harm’s way as a civil rights worker in the Deep South, and a couple who struggled to redeem their child from autism.

Of course, the heroic exploits recounted in “Rescues” are full of high adventure: Ronald Rosser single-handedly cleared out a network of enemy bunkers in Korea; Tim Mosher saved the life of a rape victim by intercepting the attacker’s knife blow; Hollis Watkins outwitted a back-country Southern sheriff who released Watkins from a jail cell and tried to send him into a kind of ambush of bloodhounds.

But Lesy needs to know more about his heroes than the details of the exploits that earned them 15 minutes of fame. He probes deeply into their hearts and souls; he asks the most intimate questions about what happened to them before and after their acts of heroism, and tries to divine how they came to be heroes in the first place.

Thus, entirely aside from the tales of heroism that Lesy tells us, “Rescues” is a book of American portraiture--rich, vivid and haunting. Lesy’s description of how Curtis Sliwa stocked the shelves of an A&P; on the night shift, for example, is a kind of poetry in itself.

Above all, “Rescues” is about transfiguration: “The instant before a heroic act, a man is a man,” Lesy writes. “An instant later, he looks like an angel; a few minutes more and he looks like a man again.”

Thus, in Lesy’s eyes, every hero has 1,000 and one faces: “As I listened to Tim Chorcoran tell his story, he kept changing shapes, from Tiny Tim to the Incredible Hulk to Christ on the Cross,” Lesy muses about one of his chosen heroes, a rather hapless fellow who took on four drunk men and prevented them from stabbing another man to death.

At the end of “Rescues,” Lesy proposes an answer to the questions that drove him to write the book: “Heroism is a dialectic,” he suggests. “All the bad a hero knows about himself collides, in his conscience, with all the good he hopes to be. They succeed because of all the times they’ve failed; they win because of all their losses.”

Still, Lesy seems to suggest that there is something more at work here, something transcendental and sublime, and Lesy embraces his heroes as examples of moral and spiritual redemption.

“You’re talking like a man with a calling,” Lesy tells Hollis Watkins. But Lesy is describing himself too, and his book shines with the elusive light that beckoned him on his quest in the first place.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Laughing Sutra” by Mark Salzman (Random House).