DISCOVERIES

Answering 911

Life in the Hot Seat

Caroline Burau

Borealis Books: 206 pp., $19.95

IF you’ve ever dialed 911 in Ramsey County, Minn., you may have gotten Caroline Burau, who took the job some years after leaving behind the no-good boyfriend she’d run off with and the crack addiction and the rap sheet (loitering in Florida). She’s tried nursing school, journalism, and then, wanting a job helping people, she becomes a 911 operator. When people ask why, she tells them it’s “to make sure that I’m as far away from the action as possible.” Which turns out not to be the case.

True, much time is spent playing games on the computer or dealing with people who’ve lost cellphones or had their house egged. But then comes the call from the 12-year-old whose mother just shot herself in the bathroom. These are the calls that stay with Burau, the stories that people want to hear at parties. But to read her straightforward, often funny accounts of these calls is disturbing. You feel her pulse racing, her heart pounding, her effort to be calm. Deep in this fast-paced book is the revelation that being calm doesn’t mean being distant. The stress of the job is almost unbearable. (“What if I make a mistake and someone gets hurt?”) “I’ve lost my ability to chat,” Burau writes. “I’m not working toward anyone’s bottom line.... I’m not making widgets for some CEO who has a cabin in Aspen, six Jet Skis, and a designer dog.... I just work for the next man or woman who calls on the phone and asks me for help.”

*

Holy Unexpected

My New Life as a Jew

Robin Chotzinoff

PublicAffairs: 288 pp., $25

ROBIN CHOTZINOFF’S “People With Dirty Hands: The Passion for Gardening” (in which she admits stealing roses from graveyards) was delightful enough, but in “Holy Unexpected,” she brings her light touch and quirky spirituality to a loftier topic: finding God.

Chotzinoff, raised on New York’s Upper West Side as a “born-again atheist,” appalls her family -- well-to-do, intellectual, prominent -- by weaving the Jewish ancestral threads into her life. After Brearley, Andover and Bryn Mawr, she peels off for the Naropa Institute in Colorado to take classes with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. “Unlike the Tibetan Buddhist summer, the year of carrying a briefcase, or my entire first marriage,” she writes, “Judaism doesn’t seem to be a passing fad.” Its rituals -- Shabbat, chanting haphtara -- give her a sense of community.

She encounters anti-Semitism and feels proud to be Jewish: “People like this had been trying to extinguish Jews forever and it never worked.” Preparing for her bat mitzvah, at age 47, she comes to believe in God: “Hineini! Here I am! ... We are here, I thought, and nowhere else, in this moment ... not just connected to each other but to everything else, which is huge.” Chotzinoff’s fearless humility shines through everything she writes, making her someone we can listen to and talk with -- about gardening or God.

*

The Scent of Your Breath

A Novel

Melissa P., translated from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside

Grove Press: 144 pp., $12 paper

AFTER Burau and Chotzinoff, thoughtful and not at all self-involved, it’s hard to take Melissa P. (“100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed”), whose fixation on artifice and seduction can be cloying. The reader is a voyeur, not a participant. The drama, the self-mythologizing seem adolescent, until you recall the times you’ve seen the world through a similar fog. The narrator’s thoughts run out of control; none is too shallow to record: “I need to live inside myself because outside no one can let me live.” Melissa is in Rome with her lover, remembering all her other lovers. Until she meets his other lover and falls into a jealous rage. Beds, rooms, telephone calls are Melissa’s universe. Deception, seduction, depression and hallucination are her pastimes. Her dreams are watery, filled with dead children and ghoulish ghosts. You read her like an archeologist unearthing primitive artifacts -- primitive but still haunting.