Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most of the prose poems in this memoir of Viet Nam amount to Polaroids hastily snapped before the mind forgets what it has witnessed: children rioting over candy at a Saigon orphanage; a bar girl singing to a G.I. ("You give me baby./ I give you V.D."). But as the authors pass out their pictures, they also provide moving autobiographies. Wendy Wilder Larsen reconstructs the early '70s from the American point of view; Tran Thi Nga offers a far more unusual perspective. The daughter of a Vietnamese mandarin, she twice became the second wife in polygamous marriages, first...
David Stockman's kiss-and-tell memoir seems headed for a quick public success --it will be No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and No. 2 on TIME's list next week--rivaling the succes de scandale it is enjoying in / Washington. The former head of the Office of Management and Budget has set tongues wagging with his contemptuous descriptions of his former colleagues and his odd self-portrait. Stockman, according to Stockman, was at once an arrogant ideologue and "a veritable incubator of shortcuts, schemes and devices to overcome the truth"--the truth in this...
...arrested her husband and who then, impressed by Duras's literary reputation, tried to court her, confiding his dreams of owning an art bookshop. Duras does not neglect the vengeful postwar period, when Resistance members continued the battle, taking their turn at torturing and executing collaborators. No recent memoir has evoked the 1940s in France so eloquently or paid such close attention to suffering and emotional numbness. The diarist spares no one, neither the victims, the victors, the reader nor herself...
...existentialism (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and the chief guru to the postwar denizens of St. Germain des Pres. De Beauvoir was not far behind. She won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her fourth novel, The Mandarins, an astringent survey of the Paris literary life as well as a memoir of her own affair with ^ Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. More enduring fame came from her monumental manifesto The Second Sex (1949), one of the cornerstones of modern feminism...
...tributaries flowing toward a connecting sea. It is the idealization of "world culture," nurtured by the legendary Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He died in one of Stalin's prison camps in the late '30s and was resurrected in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, the magnificent two-volume memoir by his wife Nadezhda. She died in 1980, and Brodsky recalls her life of outcast poverty and how she hid her husband's manuscripts in saucepans. In the end, her kitchen became a cultural pit stop for touring writers and scholars. She tired of the attention, Brodsky says, and looked forward...