Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is the theme of Tetsuko's charming 1981 memoir, Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window, which has sold an extraordinary 6 million copies, making it the bestselling book in Japanese history. The daughter of a father who was a concert violinist and a mother who trained as an opera singer, Tetsuko was thrown out of her rigid grammar school at the age of six because she liked to stand at an open window and chatter with the swallows and street musicians. She subsequently attended an experimental school in Tokyo that allowed her to blossom...
...widely traveled former correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuściński was evidently impressed by the family resemblance shared by absolute rulers, whether they reign in Addis Ababa, Moscow or Warsaw. In fact, the real subject of his ambiguous, compelling memoir is not Haile Selassie's primitive autocracy. It is modern totalitarianism reduced to its primordial elements...
...that he placed more than instrumental value on them. But whatever the cause of their preservation, one can only be grate ful for it. No other group of Renaissance drawings offers so vivid a picture of a class. They are documents as fraught with human interest as any court memoir by Hervey or Saint-Simon. In celebrating Holbein's eye with such curatorial precision, the Morgan Library has put on an unforgettable show...
Surviving in such an emotional climate was a challenge that Heywood Hale Broun was barely able to meet. It has taken the television commentator 50 years to recover, and even now he bears scars. Yet in this poignant memoir, Broun, 65, manages to salute two forthright eccentrics who "probably shouldn't have gotten married; probably should never have had a child; and probably shouldn't, after 17 years of marriage, have gotten divorced...
Early in this star-strewn memoir, Irene Mayer Selznick recalls one of the many admonitions that she heard from her father, the second M of MGM, Louis B. Mayer: "You can't run a house if you don't know how to cook. Your cook will have no respect for you." Years later, separated from David O. Selznick and temporarily cookless in a Manhattan apartment, L.B.'s daughter comes home to a ghastly vision of uncooked poultry in the refrigerator and the realization that "I had never touched a raw chicken...