Word: memoire
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Author McFee's memoir of his youth waddles along like an old tramp steamer, picking up a memory here, unloading a prejudice there, sleepily reviving the log of McFee's "first watch" (1906-11) as ship's engineer and as author. In retrospect, McFee isn't sure which of his two callings has meant more to him; he seems equally grateful that during the period of this piece he wrote most of Casuals of the Sea, and got his chief engineer's certificate. He also seems amazed at what a fine, steady chap young...
...result is, like Santayana's The Last Puritan, a novel in the form of a memoir, not autobiographical, since it centers on someone other than the author, not fiction, since what it tells really happened, not biography, since it is not confined in a rigid framework of fact. At its best, this type of work combines the narrative interest of fiction with the educative value of biography...
...INNOCENTS AT CEDRO: A MEMOIR OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND SOME OTHERS
-Robert L Duffus-
...Fremont Older's San Francisco Bulletin, the New York Globe under Bruce Bliven, and regularly comes through with a novel, a biography or some other book every second or third year, written with competence, measured skepticism and social sympathies. Duffus' latest book, The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others, suggests that he got a great deal of his color, flavor and method during a year (1907-08) spent as an adolescent dishwasher and caretaker in the household of Professor Thorstein Ve blen at Cedro Cottage near the Leland Stanford campus...
Father of Technocracy. The dates and facts of Veblen's life will not be found in Duffus' graceful, charming, nostalgic memoir. A farm boy from a Norwegian settlement in Minnesota, Veblen had the habit of looking at the U.S. economic and social systems as though he were an aloof and coldly calculating anthropologist from another culture. He wrote sardonic books about the workings of the U.S. economy in a style that seems "desperately accurate" to some, a sort of elephantine, academic pig Latin to others...