Memoir

A revolving rooftop restaurant in downtown Baltimore introduced Leonora DiPietro to waitressing more than 45 years ago. The stations, where staff picked up drinks and entrees, rotated constantly, too, which was too much for the new employee. She had locked herself in a linen closet to cry in frustration when her manager found her and spent the rest of the evening schooling her in the trade that would become her career. Over the decades, she has served celebrities, politicians, sports figures and next-door neighbors, all of whom know her as Peachy, the nickname the parish priest gave a bubbly little girl with rosy cheeks.

Thomas Fulton, a longtime physics professor at the Johns Hopkins University who swapped notes with the great minds of science, died of heart failure on April 8 at his daughter's home in Ruxton. He was 83. Born Tamas Feuerzeug, in Budapest, Hungary, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1941 at the age of 14. His immediate family fled Nazis in Hungary and Germany, where many of his other family members died in the Holocaust, and traveled to fascist Spain, where he secured three boat tickets to Cuba by borrowing $100 from a British consular official.

Michael Oher wants to set moviegoers straight about his portrayal in "The Blind Side. " He was never slow, mentally or physically. He did know football from an early age. Most important, many people besides a wealthy, loving couple in the swank east side of Memphis, Tenn., helped him rise from homelessness to football stardom at Ole Miss and in Baltimore. The Ravens offensive tackle tells his story in "I Beat the Odds," written with Don Yaeger. He details his hard-knocks life before he entered Briarcrest Christian School and was mentored and then adopted by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy.

Women of my generation could do worse than to have Nora Ephron doing the voice-over narration of our lives. Our Sarah Jessica Parker, but in slimming black and sensible flats. Our "Sex and the City," but with coffee instead of Cosmopolitans. She has been there for us since our twenty-somethings, when Harry met Sally and we learned that friendship can morph into comfortable love, even for those, like us, who once blithely dismissed commitment. I was feeling bad about my neck, but it was Nora Ephron who said it out loud in a book by the same name.

Unless you've been stuck in the house with sick kids or trapped there by snow, ice and school closings, you've probably heard about author Amy Chua and her memoir of raising two daughters in the Chinese way, with threats, taunts and unrelenting discipline. The book by the Yale Law School professor, titled "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," has had the not-so-surprising effect of bringing down more anger and abuse on Chua than she ever visited on daughters Sophia and Louisa. And it awoke the dragon of the Mommy Wars from the cave where it had been sleeping since supermodel mother Gisele Bündchen was quoted saying breast-feeding should be mandatory.

At first, Michele Norris didn't think her revelatory, heart-piercing book, "The Grace of Silence," would get so personal. The co-host of "All Things Considered" presumed that writing about race would extend the work she had done in 2008 for a multipart National Public Radio series that asked residents of York, Pa., straightforward questions. "Do white Americans underestimate discrimination? Do black people make too much of it? How would the country be different if led by a black man?"

Still coming down from the unexpectedly riveting Winter Olympics? We've got you covered. Here's our pop culture week in review -- with a bit of Olympics chaser to go down smoothly. VIENNA WINS 'THE BACHELOR': Apparently, not just for sausages anymore. ASTRO-NUT: Oh, Buzz Aldrin. You can either talk scientifically about bringing man to Mars or you can join the cast of "Dancing With the Stars." But not both. LINDSAY LOHAN TO PEN MEMOIR: Stop trying to make "respectability" happen, Lindsay.

Steve Luxenberg is a journalist and a son, and he is scrupulous about fulfilling his differing responsibilities down to the smallest detail. But sometimes, the two roles he's played haven't always jibed. On at least one notable occasion, the son prevailed. At other times, the reporter won out. Luxenberg's book, Annie's Ghosts, which was published this month, is part journalism, part social history and part family memoir. It also can be read as the author's struggle to reconcile the competing parts of himself, to pay his familial duty to his mother while remaining true to the values of his profession.