GREAT READS.

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Author: Unknown

This perceptive memoir about tilling the soil and watching the wildlife at a country house (nickname: "Ginger") in upstate New York is a quiet charmer.

Screenwriter Jentz returns to the Oregon desert where, on a cross-country biking trip in 1977, she and her college roommate were attacked by an axe-wielding stranger. Her well-crafted story of trying to make sense of lunacy is unforgettable.

Shachtman writes a riveting account of an Amish rite of passage allowing teens to sample worldly pleasures-smoking, drinking, casual sex-to "inoculate" them against sin. About 80 percent, he reports, later opt to join the church (and renounce the wine coolers).

Best known for his elegant writing on baseball, Angell, 85, remembers a privileged Manhattan childhood and his stepfather, the writer E.B. White, in these charming autobiographical essays.

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