So much of what comes down to us as historical fact is filtered through a sort of educational shorthand that misinterprets and oversimplifies. Washington and the cherry tree comes immediately to mind. I was surprised to learn that this story is still being taught, when I heard my seven-year-old recite the famous mythology. Not quite as trivial, but shorthand nevertheless, we learn Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech to the exclusion of almost everything else he ever said, just as we learn that the Civil War was fought for the single purpose of freeing slaves.

Harriet Tubman was no myth, but this rumination on historical shorthand occurred to me again as I read the illuminating Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. For so many of us, the story of the Underground Railroad has been reduced—or perhaps distilled is the better term—into a symbiotic association with that brave and stalwart woman. But, as we learn in this inspired new history by Dutchess County author Fergus M. Bordewich, the story of the Railroad and the freedom struggles of black slaves in America began long before Tubman's time. From the earliest moments in the history of this nation, Bordewich tells us, there were people engaged in helping those in bondage escape it. Though today it's difficult to imagine a society in which slavery was a fully accepted fact of life, one of Bordewich's talents as a storyteller is to make the historical and social milieu of the past understandable to the modern reader. His clear prose makes it possible for us to fully appreciate the tremendous challenges that the social acceptance of slavery posed to the abolitionists who presaged the Underground Railroad.

The abolitionist movement had its roots with the Quakers, who argued early in the 18th century that Christian principles demanded opposition to slavery. When conscientious members of that faith tried to free their slaves, however, they were met with vast resistance from both the state and society at large for bucking the status quo. It was common (yes, even in the North) for states to pass Draconian laws to discourage manumissions. People who freed their slaves could be held responsible and punished in kind for any criminal charge against said slaves, or could be forced to put up huge sums of money as bond for freed slaves. And so on. Time and again, Bordewich reports, freed slaves were sold back into bondage, kidnapped from states tolerant to their free status and sold in other places.

Given this continual resistance to the idea of black freedom, abolitionism ultimately began to coalesce across state lines. By the 1830s, abolitionists had formed The American Anti-Slavery Society, which thereby created an effective platform for what came to be known as the Underground Railroad. Bordewich's extensive research shows us how truly extraordinary and complex this movement was. However, the most important contribution of Bound for Canaan is that it more fully explores the lives, motivations, and histories of those lesser-known, everyday citizens who forged this resistance. The book also speaks of the most well-known figures in this history; you'll find well fleshed-out descriptions of Fredrick Douglass, Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, of course, Tubman herself.

Bound for Canaan is a vital contribution to American history, and is written in a style that is accessible and enjoyable to the general reader. It provides essential background for the Civil War buff, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to broaden his or her understanding of this remarkable movement in our nation's past.

The subtitle of Maria Housden's new memoir is "The True Story of a Woman Who Dared to Become a Different Sort of Mother." I admit that subtitle put me off. Like most people, I'm partial to the idea that under the definition of motherhood, Webster's ought to include a cross-reference that says, "See also 'Sainthood.'" The only "different kind of mother" I could envision wore horns and hightailed it to Tahiti like a female Paul Gauguin.

It turns out that the mother in Unraveled is far more like a decent pioneer woman in a poke bonnet who strikes out for the unknown territory of the West, a simile that crops up throughout her story. It also turns out that thousands of readers have met this particular mother before, in Hannah's Gift: Lessons From a Life Fully Lived (2003), a best-selling book excerpted in O magazine about the death of Housden's daughter, age three, from cancer.

Unraveled revisits Hannah's death, but this time in the context of Housden's own metamorphosis, from a house-proud wife and stay-at-home mom to a divorcee who cedes her husband primary custody of their three living children, all under the age of 10. Like most transformations, this one's painful.

At first she tries to fight it. OK, so her husband decides to remove his wedding ring, saying he'll put it back on when she starts acting like someone he wants to be married to. And so what if other mothers routinely knock her mothering skills, scolding her for permitting the occasional Oreo and daydreaming of time to herself. Housden still figures she has compensation enough: She delights in her children and relishes motherhood. Keeping watch over her sleeping daughter, Housden writes of a silence that is the "secret source of every mother's strength, a place where the quietest work of the universe happens, while the rest of the world sleeps."

But when the arguments with her husband get louder and louder, and she finds herself shrieking at the children once too often, Housden longs for silence in her daytime life. So her sister gives her a gift: a retreat at a Mennonite farm where guests are encouraged not to speak to each other. Three things happen. Housden begins to listen to herself and banish the critical voices of her husband and those nasty mothers. She begins to write about Hannah. And she falls in love with a stranger.

Reading Housden's descriptions of what happened to her on that quiet country retreat is like reading a good self-help book, part Thich Nhat Hanh, part Chicken Soup for the Soul, part The Artist Within, the kind of book that makes you feel calm and hopeful.

What happens afterward is a bit harder to take. The principals in this story, especially Housden's children (who accept the divorce and custody arrangement with unusual understanding), sound a little too Yoda-like for comfort. An evil part of me longed for a glimpse of ugly behavior, just a little teeth gnashing or dish throwing to keep things real. (The only unenlightened figure is Housden's husband, who retreats into a silence of his own.) In fact, Housden's spiritual bonding with her retreat man—whom she eventually marries—sounds somewhat creepy, especially when you read between the lines of the epilogue. Housden's own silences can be disquieting.

Still, Maria Housden carefully places quotation marks around her story to remind us that hers is only one version of these events. The former Woodstock resident also suggests, gently and persistently, that there might be more than one version of a good mother, and that any definition of motherhood is bound to keep shifting and evolving, no matter how much we might like to capture it safely in a dictionary for all time.

What's the best way to treat people? How do you deal with angry feelings? Is there really such a thing as luck? Every human has faced these questions, and if you have children, you'll encounter infinite variations as you try to guide them along their own twisty life paths.

Our grandparents used books like the Bible, Koran, and Talmud to teach lessons of wisdom, morality, and kindness. But in a world where an increasing number of us are checking the "spiritual, but not religious" box, new alternatives are needed. Dogma-lite need not apply; anything preachy or ponderous won't work with the sound-byte generation.

It was in search of such books for my eight-year-old daughter that I discovered The Three Questions, a retelling of a Leo Tolstoy short story by Jon J Muth, a Kingston-based children's book writer and illustrator with a talent for breaking big concepts into cogent, digestible pieces.

Zen Shorts, Muth's latest picture book, consists of three stories within stories that are spun by Stillwater, an enormous panda who arrives in the suburban neighborhood where Addy, Michael, and Karl live. Each of the siblings pays the bear a visit, and Stillwater tells her or him a koan-like tale that links with whatever they've brought along with them: a wagonload of anger, a gift of cake, a question about good and bad.

To Addy, he recounts the story of a poor uncle (a polar bear, of course) who, upon finding a burglar in his home, gifts him with his only robe, and wishes he had more to offer. To Michael, he tells the well-known story (reputedly several thousand years old) of the farmer for whom the loss of a horse helps show the village the meaning of good and bad luck. To Karl, he speaks of a young monk who couldn't stop being angry with an imperious woman an old monk had lifted over a puddle. "I set her down hours ago," the old monk finally says. "Why are you still carrying her?" Each tale is an ageless gem, transmitted here with deft, gentle grace.

The use of two very different illustrative styles helps separate the main story from the ministories nested within. Softly glowing watercolor is employed for most of the book—Muth uses a cool, washy palette with centering touches of yellow and gong-like spots of red; the panda's narratives are illustrated in spare black ink. Muth has studied brush technique in Japan and Asian-inspired visuals abound throughout the entire work.

One part of the book's construction seemed flawed to me: the unremarked-upon arrival of that giant talking panda in an otherwise "normal" human world. Stillwater (whose name, says Muth in his author's note, is derived from the idea that you can't see the moon's reflection in water unless the water is calm) is a storytelling device, plain and simple, but my grownup mind wanted his appearance to be more logically finessed.

My daughter wasn't bothered. She did, however, have a quibble of her own: "Where are their parents?" I knew the answer to that one: They were probably out hunting for spiritually generous books the children would actually enjoy.

Muth had a previous career as a comic-book illustrator, and has said that he turned to creating picture books when his children were born. The drive to nurture a young child's soul is as compelling as the one to stare at the moon. Zen Shorts helps this urge amply, and if we parents are lucky, Muth will continue to turn out books that make this job just a little bit easier.

Beat culture of the 1950s and 60s included writers often overlooked by today's readers, even those who actually finish On the Road. But lately the movement's canon is "Recapturing the Skipped Beats" (as a landmark Chronicle of Higher Education article proclaimed in 1999), typically people of color and women. A celebrity for the cause and among those identified as comprising "the first full generation of female Beat writers," Janine Pommy Vega has released her 20th book, The Green Piano. Bestowing beatitude upon figures occluded on the margins of American counterculture, particularly those locked within the prison system, this powerful volume of verse is destined to secure Pommy Vega's place in the galaxy of American poets.

Vega, who currently resides in the hamlet of Willow (a notable setting in The Green Piano), first united with other Beat personalities in New York City when she was 16. Settling for a time in San Francisco, where City Lights Press published her first book, Poems to Fernando (1968), and later living abroad for extended periods, she also has traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. For nearly a decade, the artist/activist/educator has belonged to a writing group at the Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch; she currently teaches at two other prisons for the Bard Prison Initiative. This personal history informs the subject matter and tone of The Green Piano, its name and animus derived both from a musical vision the author experienced during an upstate New York meteor shower and an upright piano she painted (deep green with a zodiac motif) in Italy for an art collector.

Awash in elemental symbols, such as water (moving and iced), forest floors, birds in flight and night sky, yet retaining the vernacular of an unblinking diarist who indicts US military aggression and social policies, the collection achieves political lyricism. Its "terrible beauty" (to quote anti-war Yeats) is tempered by Black Sparrow publisher David Godine's knack for elegant book design and Saugerties artist Carol Zaloom's vibrant cover illustration (a pea-green upright piano stationed under a streetlamp on a cobblestone city block as if echoing the fountain described "in the tiny square / like a giant child peeking out of a dollhouse" in Vega's "Colosseum"). Repeated in identical stanzas that launch companion title poems, numbered I and II, the lines "someone has lifted the lid / and begun to play" sum up the author's overall project, timely as well as timeless.

Divided into four sections, the book opens with a suite of prison-themed poems. Many employ long-line, expansive compositional strategies, such as cataloguing and enumeration. For instance, statistics compiled in "The Age of Grasshoppers" document "320 billion for defense, 100 billion for a war / no one wants against a beautiful land / and its ancient people."

Elsewhere socioeconomic landscapes dissolve into quiet illuminations that reveal the monumental in the momentary, suggestive of "miniatures" penned by French surrealist Jean Follain ("Today love has settled in like a toothache" reads the first line of Vega's "Piazza della Bussola"). The volume's final, title section meanwhile reads like a series of vacation or political-outpost postcards from Rome, Bologna, and Sarajevo. Elsewhere in The Green Piano the poet borrows from Pan-African oral traditions, including spirituals and slave chants, exemplified by "Habeas Corpus Blues" and "Mean Ol' Badger Blues."

"Sometimes I just don't want to hear another prison poem," admits the narrator of "Thoughts in the Morning," as if addressing the ubiquity in The Green Piano of those that grimly acknowledge the incarcerated among us. But Janine Pommy Vega makes clear we cannot afford to throw away the keys, calmly insisting in the epiphany that closes "Tray": "I have something here to share with you / it has brought me to your door."