Critics' choices for Christmas.

Vivian Segall is a writer and editor in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Sometimes there is a perfect book for a perfect place, as I found out a year ago when my husband suggested I take Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines (Penguin Books, $9.95, 224 pp.) along on our first trip to Europe. We had never been anywhere before, unless you count a comical camping trip through the Pacific rain forest and the Canadian Rockies, during which our outdoor survival equipment consisted of a leaky pup tent, a leaky coffee pot, and a bag of charcoal. Now we were in Italy. When we were not battling waves of tourists with their Gucci bags, trying to reach the next historic marvel, I was in the company of Eric Newby, who had his own first "trip" to Europe as a young officer in the British Navy in 1942. Newby was captured off the coast of Sicily, where his mission had been to paddle ashore, sneak into a German airfield, and try to destroy as many bombers as possible.

Newby became a prisoner of war, and Love and War in the Apennines is his account of what happened to him and other POWs after the Italian armistice in 1943 left the Germans in control of Italy. Freed from prison camp, where he had unfortunately broken his foot the day before, he fled to the mountains to hide from the Nazis. Newby, who after the war became a much- admired travel writer (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Slowly Down the Ganges) is modest in recounting his months on the run, aided by poor Italian farmers and villagers. Others suffered more, he writes, faced more danger, or risked their lives for him. He is exquisitely aware of how dependent he is on the kindness of those who feed, clothe, and house him, in spite of the paura-fear-of being shot for helping a POW.

It's a remarkable story, made more so by the cast of rural characters, some seemingly preserved from the seventeenth century, and by the constant fear of betrayal and capture. (Even better, there is love at first sight, as he meets and is helped by a village girl whom he marries after the war.) He hides buried in a pit, in a cave, in huts, and on a farm, where his job is to dig rocks out of the fields and pitch them over a cliff. At this farm on the Pian del Sotto, where the most comic scenes occur, he fantasizes about returning after the war, his fortune made, and "employing people to fill carts with stones so I can empty them over the cliff." The mother, Signora Agata, relays messages to those in the fields by flinging open a window and hollering in the appropriate direction. Evenings are spent around the fire, discussing London and famous English criminals like Jack the Ripper. The signora's yelled communications reminded me of our own attempts to use Florentine pay phones, which usually ended with one of us shrieking into the receiver, clutching one ear to block the roar of motorbikes, pedestrians, and church bells, never quite able to make out the reply.

On a day off from harvesting boulders, Newby goes for a walk and is discovered by a German officer carrying a butterfly net. It is Newby's good luck that this officer turns out to be a professor of lepidoptery whose military assignment is to teach German soldiers about the Renaissance. The Italian villagers have mistaken Oberleutnant Frick for a fisherman, Newby writes, for none of them has ever heard of hunting butterflies. Thus, when Frick asks "in his painstaking Italian what was the best way to the top of the mountain, they thought he must be a lunatic to want to go fishing on the top of a mountain which was over four thousand feet high."

It was delicious indeed to return from a day viewing the masterpieces of Italian culture, those monuments to genius and wealth, and read Newby. Early on, he is rescued by the Zanoni family and given a dry, warm bed in their cavern-like home-"it was the best bed I ever slept in, before or since"-and counts himself the most fortunate man in Fortress Europe. Another benefactor is the shepherd Abramo, who lives in a hut of wattle and turf, and who wraps the feverish "Enrico" in shirts woven by his great-great-grandmother in the eighteenth century. It is awe-inspiring to be in the presence of six-hundred-year-old masterpieces. It is equally instructive, as our bizarre century ends, to realize that fifty years ago some people in Italy were living in huts, eating out of hand-hewn wooden bowls, and wearing animal skins.

I immersed myself in another memoir of a young man caught in the trap of World War II, Peter Gay's My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (Yale University Press, $22.50, 208 pp.). Gay, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, is the author of many books, including the five-volume The Bourgeois Experience as well as a biography of Freud. My German Question is his painful analysis of how he coped with growing up under the Nazis, until he and his parents were able to flee to Cuba in 1939, and to the United States in 1941. My parents were also from Berlin, but unlike the Frohlichs (Gay is the name the family chose as a joyful Americanization), they did not make it out of Germany before the Holocaust. Gay, a scholar of the Enlightenment, aptly calls this book "the story of a poisoning and how I dealt with it."

Gay brings his analyst's eye to his own childhood-he was born in 1923-and is unflinching in portraying himself, his family, and friends. After the war, Gay (along with other German Jews), was subjected to disparagement, "usually laced with self-righteous anger," from those who wondered, ignorantly, why all the Jews in Germany had not simply left the country in 1933, when Hitler came to power. This book is an angry answer to those facile, and infuriating, questions.

Gay is at his best describing his family and their Berlin milieu, and it is here that I found many astonishing similarities to my own family history. He deftly explains the peculiar Berlin sense of humor and love of nonsense, such as this snippet: "Look, I told you, the sausage tastes like soapsuds." Berliners, my parents included, apparently find this hilarious. Both Gay's Onkle Siegfried and my grandfather, Albert Segall, were given the Iron Cross for service in the First World War; his father and my grandfather were china and crystal merchants in Berlin; our mothers were skilled seamstresses; Gay and my father both loved chocolate; in fact, my grandmother would often serve a giant chocolate bar to her son and husband instead of dinner! "Chocolate pudding, with vanilla sauce, of course, was my mother's department," Gay writes, an expression I can hear coming from my own father.

As part of what he calls his survival strategies for coping with the savage "whirlwind of hate and contempt" that Jews were living under, Gay became an ardent soccer fan (ditto my own father). He and his father also developed a passion for collecting stamps-as did my father. Brilliantly, his father hides valuable stamps under photos in a book about the Nazis, and successfully sends the stamps undetected to relatives overseas. Going over his German travail was painful, and his prose at times seems tense and too careful. But at other times, his imagery is piercing: "Berlin seemed far away, but that was an illusion; for years I would pick fragments of it from my skin as though I had wallowed among shards of broken glass."

Half Magic (Harcourt Brace, $6, 192 pp.) is a reissue of Edward Eager's classic children's story of magic and mayhem. It is the first of a seven- volume series written in 1954. I first learned of the book when Commonweal's children's book reviewer, Daria Donnelly, recommended it. The mayhem begins when four children find a magic charm on the sidewalk and discover it will make any wish come true-but only half of it. Wishing the cat could talk results in a feline who can indeed speak, but only gobbledygook. Wishing they were all on a desert island lands the four children in a desert instead. The results are often hilarious as the children must remember not to make idle wishes and to phrase their wishes as doubles of what they want.

Half Magic is suitable for all ages. I read it happily, as did my my fifteen-year-old son, my thirteen-year-old daughter, and my seven-year-old daughter. My forty-eight-year-old husband, who seems to spend all his time reading George Weigel's Witness to Hope, has only read half of Half Magic. Sarah (the thirteen-year-old) pointed out that he must have wished he'd read it all.