FOUR extraordinary memoirs by former hostages in Beirut are modern versions of the Book of Jonah.

This "extraordinary memoir . . . recalls the Holocaust with the powerful immediacy of innocence," Julie Salamon said in these pages in 1997.

The result in "A Soviet Odyssey" is an extraordinary personal memoir of the Stalin years.

Out of that experience came in 1979 an extraordinary fictionalized memoir that was translated into English in 1983 as "South of Nowhere."

It's all there in his extraordinary memoir.

"Berger's book is an extraordinary memoir, full of pride, tenderness and love," Thane Rosenbaum wrote in the Book Review in 2001.

This may seem surprising, given that the author is Joan Didion, who has adapted her extraordinary best-selling memoir about being blindsided by death.

Covering the years until 1950, this is an "extraordinary" memoir, Ann Hulbert said here in 1993.

We were having an after-dinner cognac in the first-class cabin of the 727 when Father Dunn reached that point in the story of D'Ambrizzi's extraordinary memoir.

Berger's book is an extraordinary memoir, full of pride, tenderness and love.