Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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POETS IN THEIR YOUTH: A MEMOIR...
...What the hell is happiness?" John Berryman once asked his first wife, the author of this memoir. He added another question: "Should a poet seek it?" For Berryman and many other poets of his generation, the answer seems to have been no. They did not flame out young, like Keats and Shelley. But few of them enjoyed their later years, and they are all gone now: Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. They left behind some splendid poems and some terribly sad histories of alcoholism, mental illness, despair and suicide...
Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir is at once a glorious success story and a seeming fairy tale From a humble Midwestern south in Sioux Falls, N.D., Fairbank soared through stints at Exeter. Wisconsin Harvard and Oxford, breezing academics and keeping a quirky sort of perspective on his meteoric intellectual development. I broke the cadence and entered Wisconsin instead of Harvard. This was partly because coeducation appealed to me. I knew how to study. What else was there...
...expensive, impractical and unAmerican. None are more eloquent-or surprising-than Richard Rodriguez. A Mexican American by birth who trained as a scholar of Renaissance literature, Rodriguez, 36, is a writer of rare precision and grace. His new book, Hunger of Memory (Godine; $13.95), is a perceptive and touching memoir about growing up in an immigrant family and about the emotional costs of studying his way to a secure place in the Anglo intellectual hierarchy. In the book, Rodriguez bears knowledgeable and compelling witness against America's recent methods of educating the underprivileged, and especially against bilingual education...
Another tenement symphony full of Cohens and Kellys, bubbling chicken soup and the sound of young Rachmani-noffs practicing scales? Simon is not ashamed of a well-timed note of nostalgia, but her memoir of girlhood in the South Bronx during the 1920s will be remembered for its discordances. Being part of the Old World and female is something the author cannot forget or forgive. Beneath its iridescent surface, her book is a hard, unsentimental look at a sort of "World of Our Mothers," a place of unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, abandonments and the desolate sense that a husband often...