Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gann would be the perfect subject for a memoir if gentlemanly reserve did not glaze over his confessions when he describes the people he has known. He gives a vivid account of how it was to see the dome of the Taj Mahal from several feet away, but is woefully reticent, for in stance, when he encounters another monument, Actor John Wayne. Chapters given to his divorce and remarriage show little more than the rough shape of a life. Only when Gann describes the drowning of his oldest son, who was chief mate on an unseaworthy tanker, does uncalculated emotion...
...Olsen manages to transcend her own personal frustration to empathize with all people whose creative efforts society thwarts. Silences is more than a memoir or a narrow feminist polemic. Though the book did grow out of her own "special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly mute at having to let writing die over and over again in me," Olsen eloquently and passionately documents a spectrum of circumstances, most beyond the control of the writer, that corrupt or destroy his art. (Olsen criticizes the language's invidious bias towards the male...
...opening words of This House of Sky whisper up a big promise. They say, on top of all else, that a real writer is at hand. Yet the bright prospect may, at the outset, seem at odds with the vehicle he has chosen for his first book: a personal memoir. The form, after all, is notorious for snaring even gifted writers in thickets of anecdotage and sentiment...
...very easy to admire-from a distance. Shot on a shoestring budget with mostly unsung actors, this film was made by a young woman director working outside the studio system. Claudia Weill, co-director of Shirley Mac-Laine's documentary The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, raised the money for Girl Friends herself, then hawked the movie to distributors (eventually landing Warner Bros.). Although the film's real subject is female friendship, Weill is not a dogmatic feminist. Girl Friends tells of both men and women who suffer the pangs of young adulthood in present...
...movies, and some 80 of his short stories had been adapted for television. At his famous Villa Mauresque, he employed one of the best cooks on the Riviera, dined off silver plates and entertained royalty. Yet he was miserable. What was wrong? Everything. Or so this instructive and melancholy memoir by Nephew Robin Maugham would have us believe...