DISCOVERIES

BREAKING APART A Memoir of Divorce By Wendy Swallow Theia Books/Hyperion: 292 pp., $23.95

There are readers who swear by self-help books, and for those of us who love and depend on books, it seems right that we would turn to them in times of trouble. But self-help books can be overbearing and, worse, badly written. Often the books about one person’s experience, written with both detail and distance, can be enormously illuminating. We don’t need to be told what to do. Wendy Swallow, a journalist and professor of journalism, tells the story of her divorce and custody struggles. She and her husband of 12 years had two boys, ages 3 and 5, when she finally moved out because of her husband’s ongoing depression and their increasingly estranged and nasty relationship. But Swallow is unremittingly honest about the trauma and difficulty of divorce for the parents and the children. Her brutal honesty about the depressing five years it took to separate from and learn to communicate in new ways with her husband takes the some of the mystery out of a common ritual in modern life.

AS GOOD AS I COULD BEA Memoir of Raising Wonderful Children in Difficult Times By Susan Cheever Simon & Schuster: 192 pp., $23

I don’t think I have read another book in which the immediate relationship between ferocity and pain is quite as clear. Susan Cheever, an honest and loving mother and an honest and loving author who has shown us so much of her life in her books about her father and about alcoholism, has written a sort of gritted-teeth, here-I-am-take-it-or-leave-it memoir. “As Good As I Could Be” is a book about raising children through divorce (in Cheever’s case, two divorces). She is fierce in her insistence on order and rules, what she calls “a child’s bulwark against the chaos of the world we live in.” She is defiant about a parent’s right to spank her children, even as she relates a harrowing scene of being chased through the house by her father, who would hit his children with hairbrushes and tennis rackets. “Parenting is about power,” she insists. “I have come to believe that three basic tools of parenting are: bribery, extortion, and threats,” she writes in a chapter about the efficacy of bribery, contrary to popular notions. She writes about the exhaustive therapy her children went to from the age of 4. She writes about her tense and difficult relationships with various nannies. Cheever’s life has been marked by eating disorders, alcoholism and divorce, and with each new challenge, she seems to devise a new bulwark, a new set of rules that she endorses with increasing ferocity. Parenting doesn’t always come naturally, she writes in the opening chapter. True enough. But isn’t it more than a test of wills? Some memoirs help to guide us by negative example. This is one of them.

REJUVENATE! (It’s Never Too Late) By Eartha Kitt with Tonya Bolden Scribner: 192 pp., $20

Loving Eartha Kitt was my reason for opening “Rejuvenate!” but if you don’t adore her already, you will by the time you close it. At 73, Kitt gives her tips for staying alive, sly little exercises that work mind, body and whatever else you’ve got. Each movement has a corresponding, essential intellectual component. Breathing, for example, is physical but also involves processing even those things you are afraid of. Release is an exercise but also a process of rejecting materialistic clutter and greed. Interspersed are memories of a glamorous career: the lovers, the travel, the beluga, from a girl who was “born out of wedlock and into poverty on a cotton plantation in South Carolina.” She’s contagious.

RACING THE ANTELOPE What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life By Bernd Heinrich Harper Collins: 292 pp., $23

Bernd Heinrich has a few demons, but not as many as most marathon and ultra-marathon runners who put pen to paper. He runs with curiosity and wonder at his own animal nature, and he seems to be running toward something, not away from himself. A biologist and the author of several books on animal behavior, Heinrich analyzes the various ways creatures, from antelopes to cockroaches, run. Like a gambler studying the odds, he takes tips from his observations of animal behavior and comes up with a strategy that he has applied in various races. Woven throughout is a memoir of his childhood in a forest in Germany, of moving to Maine with his parents, and of going to UCLA in 1966 to finish his doctorate. The best lesson here for running or anything else is the importance of mixing play and work.