Stone Ridge resident Roger Kahn is best known for The Boys of Summer, hailed by many as the best baseball book ever written—probably because, like anything great, it transcends its specific topic to tell us a great deal about human nature and life. In Into My Own, he chronicles people and events of the last half of the 20th century with candor, grace, and modesty.

Kahn has indeed encountered some astonishing people and moments in time, a real-life Forrest Gump of sorts (had Forrest kept the wide-eyed decency while simultaneously possessing a formidable intellect). Journalism, sport, politics, poetry, and personal pain have all enriched and deepened his life, and in this memoir he shares the wealth.

It begins in a Brooklyn of another era, when the Dodgers ruled at Ebbets Field and a young man eager to write could find himself a copy boy at the Herald Tribune. The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ebbets Field, copy boys, and the Trib are, of course, gone now, and Brooklyn itself is much changed. Through Kahn's eyes, we understand why they mattered, and what it was like to be an ink-stained upstart, running out for smokes for Stanley Woodward, soaking up newspaper work like a human sponge.

"I'd like to write literature," he tells an editor, who snaps back, "I'm sure you will eventually. For now, get the salient facts up high."

Kahn had a sense for what was salient, and these were the days of Jackie Robinson's demolishing the "color line" in major league baseball. As he covered the Dodgers, Kahn found himself in the middle of something that clearly transcended sport, a moment in time where baseball and social change converged, and he dug in and got the story, becoming close to Robinson and the legendary PeeWee Reese, watching as they played the game and won something much bigger. The Fates must have been on Kahn's team; they, too, wanted him to write literature.

At Bread Loaf Writers Colony, Kahn made the connections that would lead to a remarkable piece on the poet Robert Frost for the Saturday Evening Post, the same iconic publication for which he would find himself covering the Goldwater campaign—a defining moment in what would evolve into the far right as we know it today. His descriptions of the frustrations of trying to get "face time" at the Republican convention of 1964 and then watching the delegates disporting "country-western whorehouse style" ("I wondered where the Republican wives were, but I suppose that didn't matter") are great fun in a scary way.

Later in the decade, he would cover the Eugene McCarthy campaign, giving him interesting brackets in which to enclose his experience of the 1960s. Through it all, he remains a journalist's journalist, telling what he sees without fear, favor, or fudging. The Saturday Evening Post and the Tribune, icons in their own right, were fortunate to have had him. Those publications—perhaps the entire journalistic climate in which they thrived, then sank—are a part of history now themselves, and Kahn's fond yet honest memories of the personalities and circumstances involved make for great reading.

Just as we get used to strolling through history's tumult with this objective, passionate, and eminently reasonable guide, Kahn winds up and throws a scorching fastball.

Not sparing himself or anyone else, he describes the demise of a marriage and the efforts he made to educate and protect his firstborn son. For all the personalities and events Kahn chronicled, nothing meant as much as young Roger. Roger's brilliance, decency, struggles, and eventual suicide, a passionate, tragic love story, must have been extremely difficult to get down on paper. Eloquent, poignant, and enlightening, the result is a great gift to the reader.

The 20th century, it turns out, was the run-up to some strange times indeed. How fortunate for us all that Roger Kahn was there.

Ask the average American who John Burroughs was and, chances are, you won't get an answer. Ask the same question of just about anyone living in the Hudson Valley—where Burroughs was born in 1837 and reigned as the most famous writer in America for 50 years until his death in 1921—and you're almost as likely to come up empty handed. But ask someone who's into nature writing, the history of the environmental movement, or ecocriticism (the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, or, more simply put, the notion that we are who we are because of where we are) about Burroughs, and you can bet they'll express not only recognition but awe.

Burroughs mostly lingers in obscurity these days, despite Edward Renehan's acclaimed 1992 biography, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. From humble beginnings as a Catskill dairy farm boy, Burroughs became a larger-than-life force as a writer and proponent of the then-fledgling environmental movement. He was a "great lion of a man" in his day, according to his friend and editor Clara Barrus. Looking like a dignified Rip Van Winkle (or Santa Claus), Burroughs owned and inhabited three homes in the Hudson Valley: Woodchuck Lodge, in Roxbury, and Slabsides, in West Park, both of which remain open to the public; and Riverby, also in West Park, a Tudor-style farmhouse designed by Burroughs and now privately owned. In these houses, he wrote 30 books and countless magazine articles on nature; hosted and swapped works-in-progress with no less than Walt Whitman; entertained Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Ford (the latter gave him a car that he crashed into his barn); paid homage to Thoreau and Emerson in several highly regarded essays; and mapped out the early versions of ecovacations he took across the country with Sierra Club founder John Muir. Within his lifetime, Burroughs saw his writings become standard textbook fare for school children and helped influence the first presidential policymaking on environmental matters.

When Burroughs' fame began waning about 10 years before his death, he blamed it on the new "moving-picture brain" of the public, and issued a private (and amusingly humorless) diatribe in his journal against silent films displacing literature. But it was Americans' turning away from nature and toward lives of convenience that forced him out of the cultural landscape. By the late 20th century he was all but forgotten. However, with the momentum gained by the environmentalist movement came the resurgence of the nature writing genre—and a renewed interest in all things Burroughs. As such, James Perrin Warren's fine new study, John Burroughs and the Place of Nature, portrays Burroughs as a major force in his own time and an important figure within American history. At recent, well-attended readings given by Warren (a self-described "Whitmaniac" at Washington and Lee University) in Kingston and Woodstock, it was clear that American readers, writers, and environmentalists, along with lovers of local history, are following Burroughs, once again, back to nature. (One member of the audience, an elementary school teacher, reported successfully using Burroughs's work to inspire nature writing in her first-grade classroom.)

Warren uses mainly primary sources to delve into Burroughs as a "great lion" in the context of his work, influences, and social life. In graceful prose, and quoting liberally from Burroughs' journals and published essays, Warren reveals Burroughs's relationships with Whitman and Thoreau, as well as their give-and-take regarding literary style and environmentalist views. Likewise, Warren includes a plethora of photographs of Burroughs with his other giant friends—Ford, Roosevelt, Muir—as well as quotes from their correspondence, published writings, and journals, to show the ties and tensions between them that later helped shape both American environmentalism and industry. In the end, says Warren, the words Burroughs wrote of Emerson could be applied to himself: "He left us an estate in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth destroy."

Take that flashlight with you to the parking lot, and lock your doors. Stone Ridge author Kim Wozencraft has just unleashed a mile-a-minute, heart-thumping new novel.

A former undercover narcotics cop and the author of Wanted and Rush, Wozencraft has taken her literary game to a new level with The Devil's Backbone, creating compelling yet vulnerable and flawed characters who find themselves enmeshed in twisted deadly plots and razor-sharp terror scenarios, all the while leaving the reader wondering who, if anyone, to trust.

The Devil's Backbone introduces two sisters who could not be more different. Jenny is dutiful and sweet, following in her father's footsteps to become a Texas cop and excitedly planning her traditional wedding to the man of her dreams, Luke (another cop). Then there's Kit, the wildly rebellious older sister, with a background in philosophy and a passion for the martial arts, who's working as a stripper and drinking like a fish. Kit is haunted by her past, unable even to name the wolves that nip at her heels and keep her pole dancing while men masturbate behind windows. Her only refuge from shame is a dojang in the woods where she practices Korean martial arts—and the bottles of vodka tucked into every closet, nook, and cranny, even in her antique car.

When Jenny is brutally and unexpectedly murdered, the reader is left with Kit, lovable but not trustworthy, trying to sober herself up without blacking out so she can find her sister's killer.

From there, the plot moves like a carnival ride, with twists and turns so abrupt and shocking that one moment the reader thinks he's got it all figured out and the next, finds himself at the same dead end as Kit, peering over the edge, wondering whether she will jump, or take him to the ultimate truth.

The book is filled with psychological terror so complex that only Wozencraft can unwind it, strand by strand, all the while keeping the reader on the hot seat in Texas, never knowing who to trust. Attacked, threatened, and thrust into a porn-ring sting operation at her stripjoint, Kit teams up with the man she most suspects of murdering Jenny, her fiancé Luke.

Kit must unravel many mysteries from her past, not the least of which is her mother's final words before dying of cancer: "I'm sorry." Haunted by questions and her sister's death, Kit seeks out a shrink, who bravely takes her on, even when her office is ransacked, her files are stolen, and she is physically assaulted by a masked man.

Wozencraft's descriptions of the hot, dry Texas air, the impressive, yet frightening bonds between police officers who call themselves Texas Rangers, and an open, barren landscape where life can be as brutal as it is free, are masterful. Her prose is infused with energy:

"Kit slipped out of her sheer pink negligee, neglijah, life goes on, bra—bra, bra, take it off, that bra, stretch it taut, shoot it into the air, no me, me, me fire it toward me! All those eyes—oh baby, oh baby, oh baby yeah yeah yeah, do it like that. All those eyes and then she looked again and there in booth two was, was not a man, was a woman, and Kit looked again and it was a ghost, it was Jenny."

The Devil's Backbone provides not only suspense, but texture, psychological depth, and a thrill ride that only comes to a halt on the last page. Breathe deep, readers, because this is quite a trip, and the heroine is not the petite beauty of the Harvard Law School graduating class. She is Kit, all too human, often drunk, ashamed, intense, and sometimes delusional. But in the end, love for her sister brings Kit back to the past, to reconcile her demons once and for all, and to learn the answer to her mother's haunting farewell.