On her 70th birthday, Lillian Carter wrote a letter to her family from India, where she was serving as a nurse in the Peace Corps.

"If I had one wish for my children," she wrote, "it would be that each of you dare to do the things and reach for goals in your own lives that have meaning for you as individuals, doing as much as you can for everybody, and not worrying if you don't please everyone."

"Miss Lillian," as she came to be known, became America's First Mama when her son moved into the White House in 1977. A strong, independent and outspoken woman who liked to drink, gamble and play poker, she joined the Peace Corps at 68.

She loved visiting Las Vegas, where Johnny Carson, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would arrange for her to spend several days at a casino where they were performing.

"We children never understood how Mama could be so lucky, but she managed to win about $1,500 during every visit," Jimmy Carter writes in this charming portrait of the woman who inspired his lifetime of service to others.

And he makes no attempt to sugarcoat what he calls her "forceful and demanding personality. ... My mother had strong and almost unchangeable likes and dislikes and never made any attempt to conceal her feelings."

She married Earl Carter, who later became a prosperous farmer, businessman and community leader, and they were the parents of four:

Jimmy, the oldest; Gloria (the motorcyclist); Ruth (the evangelist); and Billy (the baby and drunken bigmouth). Only the former president survives.

After her husband's death, Lillian Carter's life changed dramatically when she joined the Peace Corps in 1966, as her letters home reveal.

First published in "Away From Home: Letters to My Family," the 1977 collection has just been reissued with the publication of this book. Carter refers to parts of those letters when writing about Miss Lillian's struggles in India nursing leprosy victims.

Dedicated to civil rights, she was a lifelong Democrat and headed the local campaign for Lyndon Johnson, taking a lot of heat in racist Georgia for her views. Later, campaigning for her son, she was often depicted in the national media as rustic and unsophisticated.

In the summer of 1983, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died a few months later, at age 85.

"A Remarkable Mother" may not measure up to all of Carter's nearly two dozen books, but the former president tells some wonderful stories here about a woman who was truly remarkable.