Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fresh-faced 6-ft. 3-in. former high school basketball star from Lithonia, Georgia, when he ignored the advice of family and friends and volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam. He lost two legs and an arm to a grenade explosion and, as he describes in his brutally honest memoir, Strong at the Broken Places, came home to battle indifferent medical care, bouts of depression and social rejection. Among the low points: going out on a date and, while crossing the street, sliding out of his wheelchair into oncoming traffic. Through sheer determination, Cleland was elected state senator from...
...earlier memoir, Leaving Home, Buchwald described a somewhat bleak childhood spent in foster homes. I'll Always Have Paris (Putnam; 236 pages; $24.95) takes up the story after Buchwald completed a hitch in the Marines and three years at the University of Southern California. In June 1948 Buchwald sailed for France, where he took certain liberties with the G.I. Bill. He told the Veterans Administration he would be studying French, but he never showed up for class. Indeed, he never learned the language, getting by on body English and the Franglais that eventually made his Paris dispatches (including, among other...
...early days of this memoir have the charm and freedom of life lived as holiday in someone else's magic country. "My first impression of Paris was that it wasn't so much a city as a stage setting from a Broadway musical," Buchwald reports. "The sidewalk cafes were exactly as they were depicted in the magazines and movies...honking taxis, street vendors selling dirty pictures, roses, oriental rugs..." Buchwald talked his way into a job as a nightclub and film reviewer for the Herald Tribune. His career was launched. Buchwald's recollections of the Trib's scruffy Paris bureau...
Eventually, some of the bleakness of the first memoir reasserts itself in the story. The catalog of celebrity names passing through town loses its electrical charge. Returning to the U.S., Buchwald had to be hospitalized for clinical depression. Much later, his marriage of 40 years fell apart...
...said hundreds of fighters on both died in intense fighting outside Kabul on Thursday. "More fighting can be expected in the coming days; I don't think Rabbani and Hekmtyar will give in so easily," says Ganguly. -->