It's a Hard-Knock Life

LITTLE HEATHENS Hard Times and High Spirits On an Iowa Farm During the Great DepressionBy Mildred Armstrong Kalish | Bantam. 292 pp. $12

Mildred Armstrong Kalish's childhood in 1930s rural Iowa was built on stern adages like "use it up; wear it out; make it do; do without." So ingrained was this attitude that Kalish inscribed the cover of her high school notebook (of which she had only one) with an unforgiving maxim: "I had no shoes and complained till I met a man who had no feet." Filled with such details, Little Heathens, Kalish's heartfelt memoir, conjures a lean but wholesome existence in which a Saturday night "spent in the company of an ancient grand-aunt, eating candy and popcorn, telling riddles and singing hymns" was a highlight. These homespun good times offered a welcome break from the panoply of chores Kalish and her siblings were expected to perform, from milking cows and harvesting fruits and vegetables to skinning rabbits and cleaning the family cemetery. Kalish eventually hitchhiked her way out of Dodge. Now a retired English professor living in northern California, she jokes that she "wouldn't say 'Get up' to a horse again unless one were sitting on my lap." But her autobiography -- which unfolds like a scrapbook, sprinkled with family photographs, home remedies and recipes -- shows that while she may have fled the rustic rigor of her childhood, she still hasn't left it behind.

LONELY AVENUE The Unlikely Life & Times Of Doc PomusBy Alex Halberstadt | DaCapo. 254 pp. $16

Growing up in 1930s Brooklyn, Jerome Felder dreamed of being a musician living in "the gorgeous, sepia underground world of the artist." This was a particularly outsize fantasy: At 7, his legs were paralyzed by polio; a few years later, an ice ball that hit his hand ended his hopes of playing the saxophone. But with a name change -- to Doc Pomus -- a talent for spinning his woes into song and a lot of chutzpah, he became a blues singer and a songwriter who co-wrote such hits as "Teenager in Love" and "Save the Last Dance for Me." In Lonely Avenue, Alex Halberstadt traces Pomus's fitful rise to prominence in a chronicle that brings to life the colorful underside of the music world of the '50s. Unfortunately, Halberstadt never met Pomus, who died in 1991, and his book suffers from that missed connection and from Halberstadt's tendency to sentimentalize. Pomus, who had business cards that read "I've got my own problems," had a less romantic view of his life, and the most compelling parts of this biography are in his salty voice. People would "never look at me," he writes in the unfinished memoir tucked at the end of the book, "and say, 'What a wonderful, courageous fellow.' "

From Our Previous Reviews

· "There's something wonderfully over-the-top" about Thomas Mallon's McCarthy-era novel Fellow Travelers (Vintage, $14.95), a love story set in Washington, D.C., that "shuttles from senate offices to seedy gay bars," wrote David Leavitt.

· In a remote corner of wintry Maine, a burnt-out photographer grapples with a decades-old mystery -- and her own tormented soul -- in Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss (Harcourt, $14), "a dark and beautiful novel" that "moves like a thriller," Graham Joyce commented.

· Robert Malley called Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Picador, $16), a memoir by Sari Nusseibeh, a former representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, "a remarkable chronicle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The book, written with Anthony David, "is a magnificent study of hope under siege."

· Liza Mundy explores the emotionally fraught world of assisted fertility in Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World (Anchor, $15.95), a "well-researched and vividly detailed book" that "follows dozens of topsy-turvy tales from the reproductive edge," Debora L. Spar noted.

· Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, $14.95), by Lynn Hunt, mines history to find original and thought-provoking answers to the question, as framed by Maya Jasanoff, "Why and when did we ever start to think that human beings were universally equal, let alone obviously so?"

Nora Krug is a regular contributor to Book World.