Running In the Family by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage Books)

"It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia." With a dozen crisp words, Michael Ondaatje goes to the core of what it is to live in a cold country while yearning to return to a world of color and light. Born in Sri Lanka and irrevocably shaped by it, Ondaatje gives voice to what many people feel and are unable to articulate. With memories, vivid descriptions and poetry, he catches the shimmer and fragrance of a place that he loves and then gives it to those who struggle to do the same, and fail.

Ondaatje's family is so rooted in Sri Lanka that "everyone was related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations." "God alone knows, your Excellency," was the reply given to a British governor who asked one of them his nationality.

These are people whose stories fill an island, whose names are chiseled in the stone of a church built in 1650, whose exploits still linger in houses first inhabited in 1700, and who continue to tell about the remarkable end of an ancestor who was "savaged to pieces by his own horse."

"There are so many ghosts here," Ondaatje says and then brilliantly brings them back to life: his grandmother "who died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree," his parents who whirled through the 1920s in a dazzling chaos of cocktails, dancing, and gambling, a forebear who kept biological notebooks cataloging "at least fifty-five species of poison" that could be found in this island paradise, including "ground blue peacock stones."

Sri Lanka was the breeding ground for these beautiful, reckless and mythic people; it claimed them and held them in the same way that it claims and holds this book. A country with "eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian," where a monitor lizard's tongue, cut in half and swallowed whole, will give the child who eats it the gift of brilliant speech, if it doesn't kill him first, Sri Lanka is, Ondaatje says, "a place so rich that I had to select senses" while observing it.

Through his eyes and voice comes the scent of cinnamon, rich on the skin of the wife of the man who peels it for a living, the darkness of a jungle "suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks," the shadowed figures of men standing by the side of a road, "urinating into darkness and mysterious foliage," the warmth and the smell and the feel of "slow air pinned down by rain."

"We own the country we grow up in," he tells us, while offering the one he owns to us, so generously that we can feel it in our skin and so vividly that whatever part of Asia that might inhabit our memories is suddenly alive in every one of our skin cells. Throughout the coldest winter, this book will bring the gift of heat, of flowers that "flourish and die within a month" and are instantly replaced by more, of "the lovely swallowing of thick night air" and the dreams that it carries. It's a gift wholeheartedly given by a man who can evoke a world and make it breathe forever with his wondrous and lovely words.~Janet Brown

The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell (Pantheon)

Images and memories usually emerge in a tangled coil when Americans remember the Vietnam War. It's a time that refuses to take on the detachment that comes with becoming part of past history, remaining so unexamined and raw that it still haunts two nations. For many in the United States, the demand of "Peace now" that echoed through the 60s remains unfulfilled, and the issues that divided the country then continue to gape, unbridged, decades after the war came to an end.

Tom Bissell's family history, like that of many children born in the 70s, was intertwined with this war. His father was changed by it, his parents' marriage was destroyed by it, and Bissell grew up with Vietnam on his mind, struggling to learn about his father's time there.

Given the chance to travel to Vietnam with his father, Bissell finds that his carefully acquired abstract facts find a kind of uneasy alliance with the visceral recollections that the country pulls from ex-Marine Captain John Bissell. Skillfully blending military history with his father's memories, Bissell provides a picture of Vietnam, both in the past and during the present, that is harrowing, beautiful and at times surprisingly funny. (This is a family vacation after all, as well as an excavation of a soldier's past, and Bissell is an adult child with snake phobia.)

He shows the war from both sides, giving equal respect to U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, without glossing over the horrors that were forced upon men and changed them forever. John Bissell, a man known to his fellow-soldiers as "Nice Guy," finds himself killing women who are shooting at him with Kalashnikovs in battle. "War is its own country," Bissell reminds us, "and creates its own citizens."

This is a book that offers no easy answers in its discussion of this particular war and the lessons that it carries over to the present day. Bissell's retelling of how the U.S. removed itself from Vietnam is stark, brutal, and essential for America to remember as it contemplates a withdrawal from Iraq. The memories that his father dredges up are pieces of truth that need to be kept in mind as military personnel return home from the Middle East.

"One of the books I read says that World War II taught its generation that the world is dark but essentially just. Vietnam taught its generation that the world is absurd," Tom Bissell tells his father.

"That's horseshit," his father replies in their continuing argumentative discussion that proves to be honest, loving, and illuminating.

The lessons of the Vietnam War have yet to be fully discussed, but these two men provide a fine example of how to begin, how to listen, and how to come to an internal and personal peace.~Janet Brown