of the psychiatric couch.) Another reason Messrs. Kidder and Todd have thrived together for decades is that "each of us imagined himself more forbearing than the other, and as a rule kept our irritations to ourselves." But despite their mutual forbearance, by this account author and editor play largely to type. Mr. Kidder assumes the traditional writer's role of perpetual adolescent ("Is your eldest at home?" Mr. Todd once said over the phone to his author's wife), while Mr. Todd takes the role of avuncular guide, treating his wayward charge with bemused irony. Divided into chapters on beginnings, narrative, memoir, essays, dealing with facts, style, the business of writing, editing and being edited, and a usage guide, "Good Prose" mixes memoir and instruction, with sections written from the writer's perspective, sections written from the editor's, and sections written together. While unconventional, this structure doesn't feel disjointed. You are in such good companycongenial, ironic, a bit old-schoolthat you're happy to follow them where they lead you. Reading their chapter on narrative structure, you know they've put careful thought into how to organize the book. "The fundamental elements of a story's structure are proportion and order," they write. "Managing proportion is the art of making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of characters, events, ideas, of deciding where the accents go. Often it means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficial trivial detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning."For me, the memoirish sections hold special fascination, because they cover life in the 1970s at the Atlantic, the magazine where I work now. "Every month the staff argued over the magazine's cover and usually ended up with something colorful and overstated, in the vain hope that a touch of raciness would improve newsstand sales," the authors write. "But the covers threatened the magazine's cultural legitimacy, the real attraction for its true audience and for many who worked there." Four decades later this hits closer to home than I should like to admitbut I find it reassuring to learn that the Atlantic's editors then worried that they, too, might be spending down the magazine's cultural patrimony. (There are, of course, significant differences between then and now, too. The long boozy lunches at the Ritz-Carlton Bar, for instance, have been replaced by the Potbelly sandwich scarfed down at the desk.) In dispensing advice, Messrs. Kidder and Todd draw on their long experience. For instance, to provide a sense of the volume of reporting necessary to produce a good bookand of the distilling process necessary to find the story among mere informationthey reveal that Mr. Kidder drew his book "Among Schoolchildren" from 152 notebooks worth of material. They also draw artfully on examples from a disparate range of the best nonfiction (and some fiction) writers, past and present, from usual suspects like Emerson and Orwell and mid-century masters like A.J. Liebling, Truman Capote and Joan Didion to Jon Krakauer, Katherine Boo and David Foster Wallace. As a curriculum for the aspiring writer,