James Lord (Mythic Giacometti), memoirist of a certain artistic set that included Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Giacometti, died recently. His fourth memoir, My Queer War (FSG), deals with his WWII army experiences, and as William Grimes quotes Lord from another time, “An autobiographer is in the business of doing for
As an unrepentant Vietnam war dissenter, political contrarian, and admirer of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens, I had a feeling I would not be able to read very much of Karl Rove’s new memoir Courage and Consequence (Threshold Editions). But seized by a moment of attempted fairness,
I suppose I ought not be surprised that entertainment business big macher Jerry Weintraub’sbook, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man (with Rick Cohen)is a best-seller (Amazon rank #112). Americans have a keen interest in inside-baseball stories, and apparently
As it is a birthday of sorts (there is a story here, but you will have to wait for the publication of my memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Have Fun With Words), I am taking an opportunity to offer some personal observations (as opposed to the barely disguised morsels normally
OK, I admit that I am blind to the allure of books about food, chefs, or most of what seems to excite the foodie partisans of the reading world. I did enjoy Amanda Hesser’s romance memoir and Barbara Haber’s social history, From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon
Another phrase I am hearing bandied about with some frequency is “national treasure”—I was just listening to Alison Krauss introduce the Fairfield Four as such, and recently Viking Press’s Paul Slovak referred to Rebecca Solnit as a national treasure. So before the phrase becomes a cliché, let me
Though I am certain a regular diet from the overflowing stream of brain science would result in unconscious mimicry of various symptoms, I have continued to find neurologist Oliver Sacks’s (Musicophilia) case studies of neurological deficits and aberrations provocative and enlightening. As I did British literary consigliere Robert McCrum’
As a lifelong Cubanophile I was naturally attracted to expatriate Cuban Norberto Fuentes’s new fiction The Autobiography of Fidel Castro (WW Norton), excellently translated by Anna Kushner. And as I read, I wondered if the verisimilitude of Castro’s voice and attitude that Fuentes renders in this faux biography
Writer, poet, and University of Houston mentor Nick Flynn received well-deserved attention and commendations for the first installment of his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, which chronicled a childhood filled with his mother’s suicide and his father’s incarceration and an adulthood where he meets his father
Reading the New York Times editorial pages—Nobel laureate Paul Krugman specifically—one might get the idea that the ruling class (the speculators and the hoaxers, and the mandarins who help them rig the financial system) were being called out for their malicious indifference to the destruction they have caused.
News of--one of the trade magazines referred to him as "legendary"; I can imagine the chuckle he got from that--bookseller Vincent McCaffrey's foray into fiction with his novel Hound got me thinking back to the aftershock of the closing of his legendary Back Bay Boston book
The Kennedy crime family seems to have been the first to come up with the bright idea to import its ill-gotten (remember patriarch Joe was, among other things, a bootlegger) gains into legitimate and semi-legitimate (movies and later, politics) businesses. Thus, the crimes associated with the Kennedys' wealth have,
