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LOVE IS A MIX TAPE Life and Loss, One Song at a Time By Rob Sheffield | Three Rivers. 224 pp. $13

Rob Sheffield has spent much of his life creating a soundtrack for it. His childhood in the Boston suburbs was set to Meat Loaf, the Monkees, and his sisters' Fleetwood Mac and Rick Springfield records. One of his fondest memories is of spending an afternoon with his father, looping together the "na na nas" of "Hey Jude" into a single, 90-minute chorus. As he got older, music helped him get girls as much as it helped him get over them, and when he finally met the right one, Renee, it was, of course, over a song. The mix tape was his crutch, a hand-selected medley that expressed the feelings he couldn't articulate himself.

If Rob Sheffield sounds a lot like Rob Fleming, the main character of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel High Fidelity, that's because he is a lot like him. But Sheffield, now a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, has a more bittersweet story to tell in his affecting memoir, Love Is a Mix Tape: In 1997, Renee, then Sheffield's wife, died suddenly, at 31, of a pulmonary embolism. Her death is the emotional center of Love Is a Mix Tape, but the book is less a maudlin tribute than a celebration of pop music and its power to bring people together.

WISH I COULD BE THERE Notes from a Phobic Life By Allen Shawn | Penguin. 267 pp. $15

"Were I now to unfold for you a scroll upon which I had written my phobias," begins Allen Shawn in his memoir Wish I Could Be There, "it might stretch all the way to China." An exaggeration, yes, but Shawn's inventory of fears does fill almost an entire page of this book and runs the gamut from heights, water, subways, malls and tunnels to "walking across parking lots or open parks or fields where there are no buildings." To walk four-tenths of a mile down a country road requires that he bring a paper bag to breathe into to calm himself, a bottle of Xanax, ginger ale and his cellphone; a stash of doughnuts is a necessary "religious talisman" on car trips.

Shawn has nonetheless managed to build a successful career as a composer and teacher at Bennington College, to marry -- and later become divorced from -- writer Jamaica Kincaid and to raise two children. Wish I Could Be There is his public effort to find the root of his problems. Playing the role of patient and therapist, he looks to his childhood and, less successfully (for himself and his readers) to philosophy, literature and science for answers. The clues in his family are glaring: His autistic twin sister was institutionalized at age 8, and his father, New Yorker editor William Shawn, suffered from an array of anxieties that foretold his son's. Allen Shawn is a sympathetic narrator, lacing his story with much-needed levity and self-deprecation ("I am no more qualified to discuss the workings of the human brain than I am to dance the role of the prince in the ballet Sleeping Beauty," he admits), but his memoir, unlike most, would have benefited from more confession and less reportage.

From Our Previous Reviews

* Washington's Logan Circle is the setting for Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, (Riverhead, $14), the tale of an Ethiopian immigrant "caught on the seams between two worlds," explained Christopher Byrd, who called the book "an assured literary debut."

* Dancing to "Almendra" (Picador, $14), by Mayra Montero is "a gripping novel about the beautiful, steaming, rotten hulk of pre-Castro Cuba, where very little is the way it seems," Joanne Omang wrote.

* Sarah Helm's A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII (Anchor, $16), a biography of the British wartime intelligence operative who may have inspired Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny, "combines the history of a pivotal era with the nail-biting drama of the heroic operatives who were dropped into Nazi-occupied territories," noted Selwa Roosevelt.

* Andrew Carroll praised The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family (Berkley, $15), Martha Raddatz's chronicle of an American platoon pinned down in a Baghdad slum: It "pulls us into a world that is simultaneously foreign and familiar and makes us care about the individuals who inhabit this place long after we have closed the covers."

Nora Krug is a writer living in Washington, D.C.