Word: diarists
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Diaries are more merciless than TV cameras at exposing those who would manipulate them. The diarist, in fact, plays a doubly dangerous game. If he fakes or withholds the evidence that is his life, he will certainly give himself away. On the other hand, to strip oneself bare is not necessarily to make oneself lovable. Samuel Pepys, the diarist's diarist, ran this second risk. The self that Pepys portrayed for nine years, beginning Jan. 1, 1660, was laid startlingly bare, so much so that the diarist resorted to a shorthand code. The code has long since been cracked...
...trains bearing indiscriminate cargoes of men and things. In one car was a cage with an African parrot and a box of tame squirrels and a hunchback! Everybody, not excepting the parrot, was wrought up to a pitch of intense excitement." As the Confederacy was closing down, a woman diarist wrote in wonderful magnolia prose: "There they go, the gay and gallant few, the last flower of Southern manhood...
...most important thing is to write in your own blood," she says. "I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel." Joni's confidences, delivered in poetic portraits, produce in her huge and varied audience a spirit of communion that separates the poet from the diarist...
...German journalist who happens onto The Big Story. An old man, a Jew, kills himself and leaves a diary behind. The diary is a chronicle of concentration-camp horror, especially of the bestiality of a commander called Roschmann (Maximilian Schell), who killed, along with some 60,000 others, the diarist's wife. The diarist remembered Roschmann vividly, even though the commander had dropped from sight. Nearly 20 years later he was spotted at the opera, and the Jew reported him to the police. The official response was polite dismissal. The old Jew killed himself...
...court. Frazier has a gift for language ("Colonel Byrd, a man of vast parade") and a sharp eye for cracks in fine facades ("It seems that Mr. Randolph would declare for King James if only the King would then make nun comfortable in the office of attorney general"). The diarist, it develops, had the rare good luck to overhear a hitherto unrecorded conversation between Colonel George Washington and Prince Charles in which the master of Mount Vernon, although not hostile, remained uncharmed and uncommitted. Samuel Johnson is found to have made an otherwise unnoticed trip to the New World...