Word: memoir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...states, including New Jersey last week, have adopted so-called Son of Sam laws, named for Multiple Murderer David Berkowitz, which lock up proceeds from books and other ventures to satisfy claims by victims or their survivors. One such moneyed killer is Jack Henry Abbott, author of the prison memoir In the Belly the Beast, who stabbed an aspiring actor to death in New York City in 1981. The widow, Ricci Adan, is using New York's Son of Sam law as one basis for getting damages from Abbott...
...biographer, historian, editor and critic, Peter Quennell has been one of England's radiant literary lights for more than half a century. He is also an assiduous collector and chronicler of eccentrics, a pointillist of foible, a raconteur without fear or peer. His latest memoir, drawn mostly from the '20s and '30s, is named Customs and Characters...
Describing a colorful long-ago friend, Quennell almost casually defines a "character": "He was 'somebody,' a redoubtable human phenomenon, never totally silenced or permanently dismayed." The definition fits most of the people in Quennell's memoir, not least the author himself...
Author Hilary Masters begins his memoir with two endings. First, his maternal grandfather is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in June 1954, just a month shy of his 94th birthday. And then Hilary's father, Poet Edgar Lee Masters, is interred in Illinois four years earlier, at age 82. This narrative order runs counter to chronology, of course, but it remains true to the odd regressions of memory, that domain where the last events are most recent and hence preludes to all that went before. Masters' relatives grew old while he grew up; to recapture their pasts...
...quality of his mind, it is suggested by Kissinger in his latest memoir. Kissinger recalls a day when Brezhnev took him hunting and an enormous wild boar approached: "One could see easily why it had attained such a size. It was not greedy; it set about to investigate the bait. It examined the ground before every step. It looked carefully behind every tree. It advanced in a measured pace. It had clearly survived and thrived by taking no unnecessary chances. All its precautions attracted Brezhnev's attention, however, and he felled it with a single shot." Brezhnev probably understood...