Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree by Lisa Alther, Arcade Publishing, 241 pages. $25.

Memoirs are a tricky business these days. While they've displaced fiction in terms of sales, the market for true stories is so glutted that it's no longer sufficient to have an eccentric family or a checkered past. On the one hand, we're seeing fewer sensationalist, "I-was-a-teenage-klepto-alkie" memoirs and more thoughtful, researched ones that blend into the fields of cultural studies or historical nonfiction.

Book Review

It takes skill to write less. While so-called "maximalist" novelists who jump all over the world map and the social landscape are often deservedly acclaimed, there's a place for masterful minimalists who can fence us in and make us like it. Three fleshed-out characters inhabit the sixth novel of award-winning, part-time East Calais writer Howard Norman. The book's "action" takes place over a span of about 19 months.

Book review: The Ship of Birth: Poems by Greg Delanty

Gestating or newly minted offspring are subjects that sorely tempt poets to get cute, particularly when those progeny are their own. You can't really blame them - there's something about a helpless infant that provokes the instinctive "Aww" response. But behind the urge to croon and coo is a more solemn feeling. To be where new life begins is also to be in the presence of death - not just because of all the things that can go wrong in nine months but also because, as that pop diva reminded us, "children are the future.

Book review: Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon

Probably any adult who remembers middle school also remembers someone like Del Griswold, a central figure in Promise Not to Tell, the debut novel of Barre resident Jennifer McMahon. In the rural Vermont town of New Canaan, Del is known as the "Potato Girl" because she smells of "moist earth, forgotten vegetables.

Book review: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben

The year is 1989, and Bill McKibben is the young author of The End of Nature. In it, he has the audacity to suggest that the triumph of modernity has been a tragedy for the Earth: Through the emission of greenhouse gases, we have murdered nature, or at least our idea of it.

Lewis Lapham, the distinguished editor of Harper's Magazine and great-grandson of a Texaco founder, reviews the book and is insulted by the "nakedness" of McKibben's "disgust for human beings.

Book review: The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook by Greg Pahl

Greg Pahl's new book, The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook, is a bit like James Howard Kunstler, celebrated doomsday environmentalist, meeting Tim Allen, fix-it guy from the long-running television series "Home Improvement."

Pahl, who has lived in the Champlain Valley since the 1980s and is president of the 3-year-old Vermont Biofuels Association, has surveyed the early tremors of the impending peak-oil crisis.

Book review: The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The last words of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby have endured because they convey a wealth of yearning; of brooding over lost years and hopes unfulfilled. Jay Gatsby is one of literature's great failures: He lived the American Dream and lost it, burning with the brilliance of the Jazz Age until he was snuffed.

Book review: FireWife by Tinling Choong

»Read an excerpt from FireWife

The Oscar nominations bestowed on Babel suggest that the time is ripe for stories that remind us the world is getting smaller every day, and we're all more connected than we think. Alejandro González Iñárritu's solemn film wasn't wildly popular, but it seems to have struck a chord.

A veteran skier traces the tracks of Vermont's signature sport

Envision "a macho sport that called for resolute participants willing to endure waiting times of forty-five minutes" before boarding a lift. "Tow operators often were willing to trade a ticket with anyone willing to pack the snow for an hour by sidestepping the hill first thing in the morning." Rain, meanwhile, left most participants pushing their cars out of thigh-high mud at the end of the day after shouldering their skis long distances.

The Children's Literacy Foundation recruits young bookies

As a kid growing up in Montréal, Duncan McDougall loved books, particularly sailing and adventure stories. "I remember vividly the day I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," he says. "I sat on my bed and read it cover to cover. I had to beg my mom to go and get some chocolate. It was so powerful, that book."

McDougall, the 45-year-old executive director of the Waterbury-based