Shelf Life

A lucky Lindbergh
At 62, Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest child of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is finally coming into her own.

Her first two memoirs revolved around her parents. Now she takes center stage in her third memoir, "Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age - and Other Unexpected Adventures" (Simon & Schuster). From her farm in Passumpsic, Vt., she offers wry views on nature and writing. Yet what's most touching are two essays about her parents. In one, she meditates on eternal truths while staying on the Florida island where her mother wrote "Gift From the Sea" decades earlier.

In the other, she feels anger, then compassion upon learning - 30 years after her father's death - that he had three secret families. She flies to Europe to meet her sisters and brothers (now parents themselves), and they visit her in Vermont, bonding over simple pleasures like flying balsa wood airplanes.

Charity and hope
After World War II, Lita Judge's mother and grandmother sent gifts of food and clothing from Wisconsin to families in Germany. The two collected shoes donated by friends and matched them with tracings of feet sent by people desperately in need of shoes. Judge chronicles the home-grown relief effort in her book "One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II" (Hyperion).

Susan Goodman, a prolific author whose best-known title may be "The Truth About Poop," takes on the intricacies of electing a president in her new book, "See How They Run: Campaign Dreams, Election Schemes, and the Race to the White House" (Bloomsbury).

Judge and Goodman will join fellow New England author Barbara O'Connor, a four-time winner of the Parents' Choice Award whose new novel is "Greetings From Nowhere" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), for a reading and discussion at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Boston College's Walsh Hall, 150 St. Thomas More Road, Chestnut Hill. The annual event is sponsored by the Foundation for Children's Books.

Impassioned protest
"We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present" (Merrell) is an illustrated oral history of some 90 dissenters - the well known and the little known - dating back to 1916. There's Pete Seeger, Benjamin Spock, and Mildred Grossman, a teacher who was fired in 1952 after her loyalty to the United States was questioned in proceedings she calls "pure 'Alice in Wonderland.' "

The creators of the book, Bud and Ruth Schultz, a married couple who live in West Hartford, Conn., culled interviews and photographs from 25 years of research. The most important lesson gained from the sharecroppers, Japanese citizens confined to internment camps, antiwar protesters, and union activists in the book, said Bud Schultz, is that "they paid a price but they made a difference."

Coming out