Memoir

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object By Kathleen Rooney University of Arkansas Press / 200 pages / $22.50 Aside from the thrill (and chill) of getting naked, there's not much to nude modeling. And yet for Kathleen Rooney, this experience has become the basis of a compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry. A poet, professor and author of four other books, Rooney supplemented her income for six years as a nude model. As we watch her pose, Rooney examines nude modeling from every angle: historical, sociological and biographical.

The recent news that another memoir - Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat, who claimed that he met his wife at a concentration camp but recently admitted that they met in New York City after the war - was at least partially fabricated left me both angry and sad. Angry because such trickery in the story of a Holocaust victim violated the unwritten contract between author and reader. A memoir carries a premium because readers often form an emotional bond with the author. That reaction goes much deeper than appreciating a writing style or plot twist.

WASHINGTON - In her new memoir, Nancy Pelosi remembers the house where she grew up and the needy who would gather outside. It was Baltimore in the 1940s, and the family home in Little Italy functioned as a district office for her father. "People knew this was where Congressman D'Alesandro lived, and would line up at our door, looking for help," Pelosi writes. "It was the same when my father became mayor. Some people needed work. Others needed a bed in City Hospital or housing in the projects.

When Shanae Watkins was 12, she killed a girl. Stabbed her three times with a kitchen knife one afternoon on a busy corner in downtown Baltimore. It was a dumb squabble over a 19-year-old guy. It's been more than a decade since Watkins cut short Chineye Mills' life at age 13, seven years since she left a juvenile detention center with a chance to start hers over again. Far from burying the murder in a corner of her psyche, Watkins, now 23, relives it all the time. Willingly. In public.

WASHINGTON - The Bush White House, long accused by outside critics of misrepresenting the facts to make the case for the war in Iraq and other matters, has launched a personal counter- attack against harsh accusations of "deception" from a longtime insider who worked closely with the president. White House aides past and present are strongly dismissing the words of Scott McClellan, who served as President Bush's press secretary and has written a book accusing Bush of misleading the public about the war and more.

No wows. Audition, the memoir of the most celebrated female television journalist in history, is on bookstands this morning (Knopf). But those in search of singular shocks or rocking revelations will be disappointed. Barbara Walters has written an intelligent, thoughtful, often kind and even revealing autobiography. But with few exceptions (like the affair with former Sen. Edward Brooke, discussed today on The Oprah Win- frey Show), hers is a long career played before the public eye. We already know the narrative well.

Francis Nash "Ike" Iglehart Jr.'s extraordinary life almost reads like something out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel or short story. It had all of the patrician social underpinnings and story line the Jazz Age author would have found attractive. "Frank Iglehart would seem to have led the good life - foxhunting, timber-racing, open-ocean sailing, partnership in a Towson law firm," reported The Sun in 2005. "One wife, five children, money, old family, Union and Confederate ancestry, Princeton, University of Maryland School of Law, progressive Democratic politics.

Thea Kahn Lindauer vividly recalls the day she learned she was going to America. It was 1934, in Eisenberg, Germany, and her father, Samuel Kahn, told her about a program called Experiment in Education, in which she would be integrated into an American family, and educated to the best of the family's ability. "My grandfather asked my dad if I could go to a relative's house or somewhere closer," said the 85-year-old Annapolis resident. "But my father told him that there must be an ocean between us."

Mandela: A Critical Life By Tom Lodge For those who want much more than the view of Mandela as a global public hero, this biography combines a chrono-logical account of his life with dense critical analysis of his political and personal roles. Lodge is a well-known scholar of South African history, and he draws on a wealth of testimonies, letters and interviews from a wide range of sources, as well as the acclaimed authorized biographies, including Antony Sampson's Mandela. Of course Lodge also draws extensively on Mandela's best-selling memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, even while pointing out that "autobiography is not always good history."

The Florist's Daughter By Patricia Hampl Harcourt / 227 pages / $24 In the middle - "middle-class, Midwestern, midcentury - middle everything" - that was Patricia Hampl's lot in life. The second of two children born to a Czech florist and his Irish wife and raised in St. Paul, Minn., Hampl grew up the way so many of us did - looking for escape, circling right back round to home. She went fishing with her father. She whisked across slicked ice rinks. She listened to her mother's stories.