Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Volume I of Norman Sherry's meticulously protracted biography takes the English novelist step by step, from his birth in 1904 to 1939. Readers of Greene's memoir A Sort of Life may experience a mild paramnesia as they again hear of the novelist's neurotic childhood, his crush on his psychoanalyst's wife, his dissolute years at Oxford, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his beginnings as a journalist, and the physical and spiritual wanderings that led to the writing of his popular moral thrillers...
SUMMER OF '49 by David Halberstam (Morrow; $21.95). A quirky and informal account of the American League pennant race between the Red Sox and the Yankees deepens into a nostalgic memoir of a vanishing era, when people listened to the radio, traveled by train and went around the corner to see a movie...
...Updike's classic account of Williams' last game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Nearly 30 years later, Updike's achievement seems as secure as Williams' 1941 batting mark of .406. He turns out to be the better writer, even the tougher reporter. But readers who want to savor a memoir of two outsize ball clubs and the rude dawn of modern baseball can turn with relish to Halberstam...
Ackermann writes beautifully. "You the Mayor?" reads more like a novel than a political memoir. But the book begins to fall apart after the discussion of Largey's death...
...this charming memoir, half of PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer news team deftly links his early biography to the words and books he learned, to connections made. Born in Montreal but raised mostly in Halifax, Robert MacNeil was the son of a seagoing Mountie (in Canada's equivalent of the Coast Guard) and a Nova Scotian mother who delighted in reading aloud to her sons. MacNeil's first nonbaby words were "gin fizz" -- the name of a teddy bear. He recalls being amazed, on a rare trip aboard his father's corvette, that sailing terms derived from Viking days (coxswain, starboard) still...