BRIEFLY NOTED.

Life Stories

Song for My Fathers, by Tom Sancton (Other Press; $24.95). When Sancton's father, a former editor at The New Republic, returned to the South to write novels, he instilled in his son a passion for jazz, taking him along to listen in--even on school nights--at Allan and Sandy Jaffe's Preservation Hall, in New Orleans. In time, Sancton started playing jazz himself. (A clarinettist, he included among his mentors George Lewis and Punch Miller.) This jazz memoir's straightforward style has the virtue of allowing the musicians to speak for themselves. The book is a mirror for their private tribulations, and also for public ones: as a teen-ager at a Tulane frat party, Sancton watched, ashamed, as an all-black local band was told to play "Dixie." A moving introduction explains that this memoir was written before Hurricane Katrina; much of what Sancton lovingly depicts has now vanished in space as well as time.

But Enough About Me, by Jancee Dunn (HarperCollins; $24.95). Dunn grew up culturally bereft in the nineteen-eighties, but parlayed a modest knowledge of pop music into a job at Rolling Stone. After establishing her bona fides as a square, she devotes her memoir to an inside look at being a celebrity journalist and the eventual toll this takes on her soul. The chapters alternate between entertaining set pieces--peeking into Madonna's bathroom, being given Velveeta cheese by Dolly Parton (Dunn still has it in her freezer), turning down a rocker's offer of heroin--and considerations of what it means to be an aging rock chick. Dunn tells her story in the brisk prose of a magazine profile, and, in keeping with her memoir's title, she goes easy on personal matters, apparently preferring to show the life of a celebrity interviewer refracted through the lives she writes about.

An American Heroine ...