Mary Cantwell, who has been a writer and editor at Mademoiselle and Vogue and a writer at the New York Times, gives us an elegant and lyrical autobiographical account of a time and place that for some exists only in imagination. But this is a life as it was actually lived, with romance, passion, and no little share of pain. Like her earlier, warmly received American Girl: Scenes from a Small-Town Childhood, Cantwell's new book "offers many of the...