Word: memoire
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Jobs were as scarce in Ireland as they had been in America, but life did not much improve on those rare occasions when Frank's father Malachy found work. As McCourt recalls in a spunky, bittersweet memoir called Angela's Ashes (Scribner; 364 pages; $24), his dad was both a kindly parent and a world-class rummy. Sober enough during the week, on paydays Malachy McCourt would guzzle away his wages at a pub and, late Friday night, stagger home, penniless. There, while his wife Angela wept and railed, he would coax his sons into singing old patriot tunes...
Paul Theroux's 20th novel, My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin; 456 pages; $24.95), begins on a decidedly unpropitious note, an Author's Note, in fact, in which Theroux describes his novel as "an imaginary memoir" and goes on to say that "even an imagined life resembles one that was lived; yet in this I was entirely driven by my alter ego's murmur of 'what if?'" Groaning seems a proper response at this point. Oh boy, another self-regarding writer playing solipsistic games for his own amusement. Anything good on the tube...
Robert S. McNamara's blinkered 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, did little to change its author's image as an American Faust who sold his soul to a demon technocracy. The former Secretary of Defense is not likely to have a good 1996 either...
...away he did manage to win Peabody and Emmy awards for his work on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on pbs, write and perform two one-man off-Broadway shows and contribute essays to such publications as the New York Times and the New Republic. He has also written a forthcoming memoir of Harvard in the 1960s. For his report on the TWA crash, Rosenblatt went to the town near the site, only 10 miles from his summer home. "I first learned of the disaster when an explosion shook our house," he says. "After that, it was all reporting in sorrow...
Puzo now keeps his wagering within the family. "He acts as bookie for his children, who will gamble on sports events, and he will take whatever side they don't want," says friend Speed Vogel, a retired businessman and co-author of Joseph Heller's memoir, No Laughing Matter...