In June of 2000, writer and self-described "nonbeliever" Julie Mars left her sun-splashed life in New Mexico for an upstate New York farming town to care for her beloved older sister, Shirley, a "returned" Catholic diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Seven months later, Shirley died. Depressed and despairing, the then-50-year-old Mars returned to the Southwest to explore her pain and reawakened spiritual longings by attending a different church "every Sunday for 31 weeks: a month of Sundays."

Set within this chronological frame, the eponymous memoir—part meditation on survivor's guilt and part comparative religion primer—dutifully documents the prerequisite number of visits. Divided into chapters according to week and location, with a snapshot of each place of worship (taken by the author "with Shirley's simple camera") in place of headnotes, A Month of Sundays earns its subtitle. Interspersed with impressions of a variety of religious services, both mainstream and esoteric, Mars provides the back-story of her relationship with Shirley, thirteen years her senior and a mother figure to the author. In the process, she recounts the tension and drama of growing up in a large family headed by emotionally distant parents, and her own lifelong issues with faith. A lapsed Catholic, she seeks compensation for lost religion in occult traditions (such as tarot), Eastern mysticism, and Jungian psychology. Her more recent month-of-Sundays lessons, culled from Baptists, Unitarians, Jews, Mormons, Spiritualists, Scientologists, and a host of other denominations, recur in the form of epiphanies that underscore the experience of caretaking Shirley during her final days.

Saintly Shirley, an expert housekeeper and divorced mother who single-handedly raises six children on a minimum wage and by all accounts is kind and generous, acts as a foil to Julie. Constantly ticking through dead-end jobs, habitually changing residences and experimenting with counterculture lifestyles, she runs "home" to Shirley in moments of crisis, sure of her sister's unconditional love. Their believably rendered connection can bring a reader to tears, as when reading of Mars's visit to the gender-inclusive Emmanuel Metropolitan Community Church (Albuquerque), where she is instructed to take a white candle because "someone who mothered [you] has died in the last year." Mars waits until nearly the end of the book to reveal that the sisters experienced a decade-long "blank period" of near noncommunication prior to Shirley's diagnosis. Such sequences doubtless made A Month of Sundays a nationally featured Borders Books "Mother's Day" selection, though the more evocative religious subject matter and unconventional structure may have assured its place among Barnes & Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" selections.

Plainspoken language and wry humor also infuse the book. For instance, in situating St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Albuquerque on the corner of "a quiet neighborhood filled with tiny houses," Mars paints it a creamy color with a mixture of Southwest style and Eastern features so that "it looks like breasts have been implanted onto a basic desert building." In a typically felicitous passage, we're told that the church fills slowly, until: "By 10:30, the place is packed. People chat across the pews, and women are dressed to kill: feathered hats, skirts slit to the thigh, hair falling seductively across one eye. There is so much perfume that I get dizzy. Children, many per family, smack each other as they recite prayers."

Elsewhere, amid the tearful saga of Shirley's demise, the author's remembrances provide laugh-out-loud levity. Joyfully written despite its inherent sadness, the emotionally honest and intriguing journey Mars follows in A Month of Sundays reads like an incantation or a blessing.

During the mid-1800s, some escaped slaves reached out to their former masters. In letters that rend the heart, they express an understanding that is both pitiless and generous to the men and women who sold their parents, wives, and children, abused and tormented them, worked them to death, and justified it in the name of a loving God. They have the real thing, these letters: forgiveness, rage, acceptance, stern judgment. Because they are written in the gracious, formal manner of the 19th century, they combine a dignity, moral outrage, and positive purpose that is impossible to find today. We cannot imagine the lives of American slaves, nor the heroic work of traveling a thousand miles to Canada. That they should survive, make a new life, travel back, return with family, and yet still reach out across that impossible distance to connect with and confront their abusers is proof, like no other, of the healing power of freedom.

Freedom is the principal theme of Voices of a People's History of the United States, an illuminating anthology of first-person, eyewitness, and creative accounts. And obscure, compelling details are what make this 665-page book special, invaluable.

During the colonial period and the years pre- and post-, there were hundreds of insurrections. After the war, many disenfranchised merchants saw the landed gentry as essentially British, and the rebellions (Shay's, et al.) continued the good fight to make the promise of equal opportunity real. It was messy. These frontline dispatches, some decades later, underscore how pragmatic our Founding Fathers really were. Self-satisfied piety was a detriment when fair play was being legislated one bloody detail at a time. Understanding the Founding Documents as defensive writings, intended to channel universal revolutionary fervor, is a new perspective for most of us.

It's such a rich volume. I can create a litany of its better pieces: the horrified officer's letters during the "war" with Mexico; Harriet Hanson Robinson's "Factory Girls"; the bread riot descriptions that reveal a South ripped by profiteers and landowner abuses during the Civil War; the astonishing, pivotal strike in 1930s Flint that elevated Walter Reuther, enabled mainstream unions, and saw the police fire point-blank into unarmed strikers. Genora Dollinger's account of her baptism under fire as a union speaker, where she calls for the strikers' families to walk bravely past the police lines, backs to the guns, in order to save their husbands, is unforgettable. This was not long ago, or far away. The unions and their members made us a better country. Ronald Reagan's grandstanding with the air traffic controllers was a refinement of yesterday's thug tactics, minus the brutal face. But the campaign to diminish worker protections and disenfranchise unions continues, and Zinn and Arnove remind us of its tradition and context.

Some of these texts should be read aloud every year, perhaps on Americans Day (as opposed to America Day, July 4th). In every public square and high school, let's temporarily interrupt the Rush Limbaugh lie-fest on our public airwaves. Let's take turns and read aloud from this volume: Muhammad Ali's refusal to fight in Vietnam, Vicky Starr's "Back of the Yards," Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" Most of all, we need Dalton Trumbo (the excerpt from Johnny Got His Gun is perfect). Many of these selections speak with immediacy about our current adventurism overseas, but Trumbo's is rabble-rousing, heartbreaking literature that wakes us up.

There are annoyances: Zinn's intro claims, absurdly, that "there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation"; he introduces Mumia Abu-Jamal without a mention of the legitimate controversies about his murder conviction. Yet overall Zinn and Arnove have made an important, immensely readable, and timely contribution to our self-understanding.

In his introduction to The High Times Reader, Paul Krassner writes that the magazine "was supposed to be a joke—a one-shot lampoon of Playboy, substituting dope for sex—but it turned out to be a unique magazine that has lasted 30 years." In this compilation of articles, editors Nocenti and Baldwin have chosen a diverse selection of mind-treats that help the reader to comprehend how such a creation survived, and even thrived, through the just-say-no years and the politically correct, 12-steppin' era that followed the innocence of the 1970s, when some people believed that grass might save the world.

A spectrum of voices speaks to us of a wide variety of topics. Some, like Bob Marley, Andy Warhol, Abbie Hoffman, and Hunter S. Thompson, are poignantly never to be heard from again. The things they have to say range from outrageously silly to scintillating to profound and unforgettable. Cookie Mueller's rendering of Haight-Ashbury at a moment in time is so honest and raw that it hurts to read; Debbie Harry's musings on why she wishes she'd invented sex are hilarious. The funeral of Jimi Hendrix, the making of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album, Ronald Reagan's inauguration, a look at Walt Disney's secret life—High Times hit upon a lot of seminal moments of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and engaged the talents of fresh and brilliant voices to recount them. Robert Anton Wilson, for example, is somehow the perfect writer to cover a deadly serious scientific symposium devoted to debunking parapsychology—he debunks the debunkers with irresistible relish.

The chronological arrangement of the articles offers a fast-forward ride through eras that may seem a little silly, until one stops to remember such current preoccupations as Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. The magazine's writers have a refreshing tendency not to take themselves too seriously; an interview with a man who claimed to have been JFK's dope connection ends with writer Ed Dwyer observing, "We shook hands and I thanked him for the story—which amounted to a beguiling explanation of over a decade of American history. If true...Well, I'll say one thing for him. His dope was indeed Commander-in-Chief in quality."

Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, on the other hand, come across as sincere visionaries in dreadlocks. Joey Ramone and John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon offer fascinating insights into the music world, as does an essay on the rocky relationship between High Times and the band that was perhaps most emblematic of the doper lifestyle, the Grateful Dead.

You prefer politics? There's plenty of that, too, from what Hunter S. Thompson really thought of Jimmy Carter to an investigative report on the founding of the National Anti-Drug Coalition by Lyndon LaRouche. Nocenti and Baldwin have compiled a work that will be important in years to come, as people seek to understand the cultural tsunamis of the late 20th century. "The corporation has a bad enough conscience buried deep inside to fear, despite their strength, every type of psychic alteration that they haven't developed themselves," mused Norman Mailer to Richard Stratton in a 2004 interview.

The events and personalities captured in these pages seem curiously innocent in a time when the heartland is plagued by exploding meth labs and endless junk e-mails peddling Viagra and Vicoden. High Times, though, is still hanging in there and speaking its truths: A 2004 essay from Baghdad serves as a keen reminder that although ganja may not yet have saved the world, neither have its oppressors.

A confession: I approached reading The Ha-Ha with a few assumptions. First, that it might be impressive, but not necessarily great, since its story is told through a silent narrator, which anyone acquainted with The Sound and the Fury knows is no mean feat. And since that narrator, Howie Kapostash, is a Vietnam vet, I figured a ha-ha had to be an Asian or military term, used ironically to refer to one of Howie's war memories. I was wrong on both counts. In fact, the novel produces the very results that a ha-ha—a boundary wall concealed in a ditch so that it doesn't intrude upon the view—was designed for: I was taken by surprise.

A 19th-century English invention, the ha-ha helped to create uninterrupted views from the mansion and its lawns of distant places of bucolic beauty: copses, lakes, meadows dotted with grazing livestock. According to The Ha-Ha's preface quote from the New York Botanical Garden Illustrated Encyclopedia of Horticulture author Thomas H. Everett, its name "derives from the exclamation that a stranger might make upon coming upon such a ditch unexpectedly from the top of the wall." So, what does a Victorian landscape gardening convention have to do with the middle age of an American veteran of one of the world's most pointless wars? Absolutely everything, as it turns out. The ha-ha at the convent where Howie works not only elicits a certain thrill for him when he coasts over it on the ride-on lawnmower, but brings back war memories, and stands as a metaphor for Howie's troubled past, current lonely life, and uncertain future.

"Why am I here?" Howie asks himself, thus beginning his story. "Why?" is the question he's asked ever since Vietnam, and the only question he didn't ask when his draft number came up. Wounded by a land mine just weeks into his tour of duty, Howie lives with a dented forehead and the damaged left-temporal lobe-conditions of anomia and alexia, which make it impossible for him to speak or write his thoughts or his memories of what he calls his "fall" as a young soldier. Over the years he's lost or given up everything that ever eased his pain: both of his parents, the hope of things improving through speech therapy, and a never-relished long-term reliance on drugs and prostitutes. All that remains is his beautiful, manipulative high school sweetheart, Sylvia, for whom he still pines.

So it's Sylvia's house where Howie winds up, ready to perform yet another favor by taking in her troubled nine-year-old son, Ryan, while she goes into rehab. In the course of half a summer, Howie finally falls in love—with Ryan, with parenting, with Little League baseball, with being his own man again, with Sylvia—and then finally, out of love with her, as he discovers friendship and hope right in front of him. Ryan's presence rallies the members of Howie's "nontraditional household" (Ryan's words)—two young handymen nicknamed Nit and Nat, and Laurel, a Texan of Vietnamese descent—to understand him in ways none of them expected, and Howie finds himself more expressive than he was before his wounding.

Author Dave King, who divides his time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, conjures a straightforward, gracefully awkward, agonizingly heartfelt voice to show us how Howie's world shifts as he steps off the ha-ha into the sickening space of the future and miraculously lands on his feet this time. Like Howie, King has taken a leap with this debut novel and found his way. We can look forward to what he comes up with next time, now that he's walking tall.