Word: memoire
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...memoir, Burning the Days is at once uncannily precise and irritatingly vague. Here, in a small paradigm of exactitude, is the way he capsulizes a friend, Robert Phelps: "He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France." Salter's episodic memoir is studded with such fond remembrances of things, and persons, past: an insouciantly comfortable whore at a chic brothel in Morocco; that aged lion of a writer Irwin Shaw, drawn irresistibly to womanly beauty. "The great engines...
...often, middle-class women of color are either airbrushed from America's literary canvas or painted with hackneyed strokes. While a smattering of books have attempted to redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail...
...Parker's memoir, by contrast, is a carefully constructed and subtle rendering of a richly textured life. The "first black woman" wherever she went--prep school, Radcliffe, a tony law firm--Parker deftly mines the universal in experiences that bear both the good fortune and freight of a privileged birthright. Her warm evocation of her childhood in Durham, N.C., where she ate several dinners each day to satisfy the neighbors who beckoned, "Gwennie Mac, come on in," makes you hunger for a time when children were everyone's responsibility...
...ruled East Germany for 18 years, was judged too ill to stand trial, went into dignified exile in Chile, and died there in 1994. Spymaster Markus Wolf scored a similar coup, convincing a constitutional court to overturn a treason conviction and leave him free to pen a best-selling memoir. Until today's conviction, responsibility for the killings had fallen to border guards and military officials...
DIED. MATTIE LOU O'KELLEY, 89, nostalgic folk artist of rural America; in Decatur, Ga. Only in her 50s did she start to paint. Her canvases became her memoir, telling stories of hard work and simple pleasures...