Bookshelf: 'The Convert,' 'Bullfighting'

One day in her local library, Deborah Baker, author of "The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism" (Graywolf Press, $23), stumbled upon 24 letters written between 1962 and 1996 from Margaret Marcus to her parents. In 1962, Margaret, then a devoted student of Islam and of the influential Islamic thinker and political leader Mawlana Mawdudi, accepted Mawdudi's invitation to go to Pakistan and join his household.

Baker started asking questions: Why did Margaret convert? Why did she feel so compelled to leave the West? How did she fit into that strange new household? And, finally, what was the state of her mental health? This last question leads Baker down a fascinating path, through Margaret's diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1957, her stay in a mental hospital outside Lahore, her arranged marriage to a friend of Mawdudi's and on into a thicket of lies and cultural miscommunication that helps the author distill the relationship between Islam and the West. There are many conversions in this story that illuminate a subtle relationship between two cultures rarely revealed.

Roddy Doyle has written novels, screenplays and short stories. He is well loved for his dry humor, which, in "Bullfighting" (Viking, $25.95), seems more often to ignite doubt and light the path to despair than in the novels.

Happiness is the theme of many of the 13 stories, the best kind of happiness -- happiness with everyday life. In the title story, the narrator's greatest joy has been in raising his four sons. As they leave home one by one, a great chasm opens up in his life. On holiday and drinking with the lads, he finds himself at a bullfight and watches as the bull is set on fire. Doyle never tells a reader what to think and so preserves the sense of wonder and interpretation that is pure oxygen to the story form.

He follows his characters down streets and through thoughts, stalking happiness, held back by strange memories and insisting on simplicity and beauty, on the delicious luxury of routine.

Novels set during World War I possess a desolation, violence and desperate longing to go back, to return to life as it was lived before the war. "The Sojourn" by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press, $14.95) was inspired by the life of the author's grandfather Josef Vinich, born in a Colorado mining town in the late 1800s. After his mother was killed by a train and his father was wrongfully accused of murder (events that confirmed the suspicions of his Austro-Hungarian relatives about America's Wild West), father and son returned to the Magyar village where Josef's father was born to start anew.

Fifteen years later, Josef became a sharpshooter in the Austrian army and was taken prisoner by the Italians. After his release in 1918, he began the long walk home. He saved a young pregnant gypsy girl who had been raped by soldiers, and together they tried to start a peaceful life. The novel is a beautiful tale of persistence and dogged survival.

Eliot Coleman is the Pied Piper of the organic, local food movement. In 1968, he and his young wife went to visit Helen and Scott Nearing on their farm in Maine. The Nearings had left New York City in 1932, pioneers in an alternative, rural lifestyle that became the subject of many articles and books about trading Western materialism for self-sufficiency.

The Colemans settled on 60 acres next door to the Nearings, built a house (without electricity or running water and heated by wood) and had three children. Melissa Coleman, the eldest, and the author of "This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone" (HarperCollins, $25.99), remembers the Nearings, the long winters, the delicious food her parents raised and her mother's battle with depression.

But the event that draws all other memories down into the well is the drowning of her 3-year-old sister when Melissa was 6. This memory puts all others in question -- were the Colemans and the Nearings and others like them focused on the wrong things? Distracted by their ideology?

Melissa, who loved her childhood and her parents, doesn't have the answers.

But her memoir is an important piece of the puzzle. The Colemans and the Nearings were not hippies or druggies or even, for the most part, political protesters. They worked hard to create an alternative economy that is still growing in rural America. This memoir is evidence of their great sacrifices.