Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...project began as a book about working wives, evolved into a steamy kiss- and-tell memoir, had its best parts lifted by the Washington Post, then was withdrawn from circulation -- all without ever being published. Such was the fate of the 80-page book proposal by Washington Hostess Joan Braden, wife of Syndicated Columnist Tom Braden, frequent companion of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and mother of the brood on which the TV sitcom Eight Is Enough was based...
...drank with Errol Flynn and romanced Grace Kelly, even as her rich parents scoured Europe for bluer blood. Cassini is best known for being couturier to Jackie Kennedy ("I want all ((my outfits)) to be original and no fat little women hopping around in the same dress"), and his memoir of Camelot is lively. He also offers good gossip, recounting Aly Khan's sexual techniques or a little joke Zsa Zsa Gabor played on a lover. But the book's main charm is the author's portrait of himself as Playboy, Second Class -- a man who had to hustle...
Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction...
Armand Hammer's memoir of his 88 tumultuous years begins near the end, with accounts of his part in 1986 negotiations to clear the way for U.S. physicians to help Chernobyl's victims, and then in freeing hostage U.S. Journalist Nicholas Daniloff and a would-be Soviet emigre, Geneticist David Goldfarb. These incidents demonstrate his unusual role as a back-channel conduit between U.S. and Soviet officials. They also reflect the pragmatic approach Hammer takes toward the Soviets, his business partners on and off since the early 1920s. Readers will search in vain for indignation about the Soviet record...
...Part memoir, part self-help manual, Everything to Gain combines some rather obvious advice on how to stay healthy (do not smoke, fasten seat belts, exercise regularly) with strikingly candid personal reflections. After the 1980 presidential defeat, Rosalynn reveals, she was reluctant to give up the dream that her husband might again run for President and win. Daughter Amy, then 12, announced that she did not want to live in Plains, Ga. "You may be from the country," she said. "But I'm not." (She went to boarding school instead.) On a lighter note, the Carters write that...