When Michele Norris, co-host of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” decided to write a book, she hadn’t intended to write a memoir.

The Rev. Tony Hefner spent six years working as a security guard for Burns International Security Services, a private company contracted to provide security at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos in the late 1980s. The processing center serves as a detention facility for men, women and children from around the world who are apprehended trying to enter the United States illegally and are waiting for their immigration status to be decided. Passionate about human justice, Hefner has turned his experience into a memoir.

Depending on who you talk to, small-town America can either be a quaint and authentic portrait of real American life or a suffocating trap. In 2006, Karen Valby, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, was asked by her editor to find a small town far removed from the effects of popular culture.

I don’t often tear up, but I cried while reading the last chapter of Dave Cullen’s bestselling novel “Columbine” (2009), which was recently released in an expanded paperback edition. My own emotional reaction to the account of the 1999 Colorado school shooting is not altogether surprising, however, given Cullen’s emotional approach to writing the book.