Also of interest ... in new memoirs

Guts

by Robert Nylen

(Random House, $25)

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“Few writers have captured Vietnam combat” as well as Robert Nylen does here, said Peter R. Kann in The Wall Street Journal. Nylen’s posthumous memoir also expends a lot of wit and energy trying to create entertainment out of his “admirable but unremarkable” career in publishing. But the real draws are his accounts of leading an infantry platoon into hellacious fighting and his equally powerful take on a long, eventually fatal, battle with colorectal cancer. This guy really did have “guts”—as well as gifts for both philosophical insight and dark humor.

I’m Down

by Mishna Wolff

(St. Martin’s, $24)

Mishna Wolff isn’t seeking our pity when she tells us that she didn’t cut it as a black girl, said Tanner Stransky in Entertainment Weekly. This “buoyant” look back by a white author who spent her early years trying too hard to fit in with black schoolmates in Seattle “explains everything as simply a matter of fact, which is endearing.” Wolff later found it just as difficult to blend with wealthy private-school kids. But the book’s tone remains light, and often hilarious, thanks to the “child-goggles” Wolff peers through as she shares her memories.

Home Game

by Michael Lewis

(Norton, $24)

“There’s always an audience” for fathering memoirs, said Josh Benson in The New York Observer. This one, by Moneyball author Michael Lewis, succeeds in part by setting many pages in Paris, where jokes can be made at the expense of the French. His modest

journey of self-discovery through child-rearing tells us nothing about parenting that every parent doesn’t already know. But Lewis is an “effortlessly prolific writer and storyteller.” He’s produced a “nice book, full of nicely told stories.”

Red and Me

by Bill Russell with Alan Steinberg

(HarperCollins, $25)

Red Auerbach’s “genius” as a basket­ball coach was that he related to every player individually, said former NBA great (and U.S. senator) Bill Bradley in The New York Times. In this “beautiful book,” the player most responsible for ­bringing Auerbach and the Celtics a string of championships revisits a long relationship that began with mutual respect and grew despite differences in background and character. Russell “might object to my use of the word ‘love,’” but “that’s what sits at the heart” of his story.