Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Books by ex-Presidents have become a lucrative business. Each of the past four occupants of the White House made more money writing his memoirs than he earned in salary while President. But some citizens, especially journalists, have objected to former high officials' profiting from their inside knowledge. Victor Navasky, editor of the 117-year-old leftist weekly the Nation (circ. 48,000), raised that argument, among others, in April 1979 to justify his printing a 2,250-word article on President Gerald R. Ford's pardon of President Nixon that was little more than a summary...
Liang married an American, with whom he co-wrote his memoir, and he presently studies at Columbia University, but he clearly has not abandoned socialism His expressions of the fervor of past political movements can be excessive, but they reveal an undercurrent of loyalty. The influences shaping this loyalty started at birth. Heng's original given name (in China the family name comes first) was Dien-Jie, or "Good news from Dienbienphu", celebrating the Vietnamese victory over the French in 1954. The political naming of children is the first step in a long process of indoctrination centering on Mao which...
...source of the problems he narrates, and properly disassociates the new from the old regime. Significantly, the book shows almost no opinion on the new regime or its policies, and that reticence renders many of Liang's observation ambiguous--even the questions which he presents at the memoir's end. Still, this insider's view, with all its uncertainties, allows Westerners a rare look at the Chinese as a people rather than simply as the propagators of a political ideology. Liang Heng is more than a son of the revolution; he is very much a son of China...
...respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth," said Voltaire. David Plante has given very little of either to the subjects of this memoir. Among the three "difficult women" in question, only Feminist Germaine Greer emerges from Plante's portrayal with a shred or two of personal dignity. Novelist Jean Rhys, who died in 1979, and Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, who died a year later, have been observed in the distorting half-light of their declining days, when illness and alcoholism had served to dim the mind and obscure the spirit...
...Midnight in 1939 was long gone. She spent most of their time together drinking gin and sweet vermouth and babbling away in a pitiful parody of her once considerable style and charm. Plante spares us few of the clinical symptoms of her senility. Emblematic of the mode of his memoir is a page-long account of the time that Rhys fell into the toilet when he failed to lower the seat after using...