Shelf Life

With the future of books under fire, it's reassuring to hear two masters of visual and theater arts say that that quaint medium has liberated a richer telling of their stories.

Since 1989, Ann Fessler, a photography professor at Rhode Island School of Design, has been exploring the lives of women who give up their children for adoption. She has produced two films as well as video and audio installations.

Now she has published ``The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade." ``The book," she says, ``has allowed me to do things I can't do with my installations."

Foremost is providing a historical context. Last summer, Fessler, 56, finally met her birth mother. Her birth mother is still keeping Fessler's existence a secret -- and Fessler understands, writing in compassionate detail about the teenager who got pregnant on a New Year's Eve long ago.

Like Fessler, Martin Moran has wrestled with a difficult past. An actor, he wrote a memoir about having been sexually abused at age 12 by a counselor he met at a Catholic camp. ``The Tricky Part" recently won an award from the Lambda Literary Foundation .

A book was the perfect medium because his story felt ``so intimate and deep and bottomless," Moran says. After giving a reading of the work in progress, he developed a one-man show that won an Obie Award in 2004. ``What I love about the book," he says, ``is that it lives on without me."

Will a book club make for good TV? On Tuesday at 10 p.m., CBS will launch ``Tuesday Night Book Club." All but the most disciplined book club discussions veer from the literary to real life, but judging from the bios CBS released of the seven women, they might be a better fit for ``Sex in the City."

Calvin Trillin pokes fun -- in verse -- at the Bush administration in ``A Heckuva Job." He will appear at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline, at 6 p.m. Thursday. Tickets ($2) are available at Brookline Booksmith across the street.

``Timothy Leary," by Robert Greenfield (Harcourt)

``On the Couch," by Lorraine Bracco (Putnam)

``The Book of the Dead," by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Warner)

Christopher Haraden, co-owner of Westwinds Bookshop in Duxbury, recommends ``Still Life With Chickens: Starting Over in a House By the Sea," by Catherine Goldhammer (Hudson Street). ``This charming and witty memoir traces a year of transformation -- the author got divorced, moved from a large house in an affluent town to a ramshackle cottage in its threadbare neighbor " -- a disguised Hull, ``where live bait is sold from vending machines," Goldhammer notes -- ``and bought six chicks to help mollify her reluctant preteen daughter."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.