Let me add, with one proviso, another option to Glen Johnson's list (an enticing one that I need to take with me to my local bookstore): the familiar essays of Samuel Pickering, available in 1/2 dozen volumes or more by now. Pickering is intensely observant and reflective, witty and irreverent and iconoclastic, unpretentious and self-mocking, and a careful craftsman. The proviso: I frequently use the essays in my freshman composition courses, but 18-19 year olds occasionally labor to respond to Pickering's middle-aged male preoccupation with on a handful of topics (family, sex, money, mortality, ambition). Steve Jobe [log in to unmask]