Word: memoirize
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...about to become a rock star. Well, the literary-humanitarian equivalent of a rock star. (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.) Beah, 26, slight and handsome with a ready but wary smile, has written a memoir, and it's a doozy. Separated from his parents at 12 when rebel soldiers attacked his Sierra Leonean village, by 13 he was a child soldier and a drug addict. By 19 he was living in the U.S., at Oberlin College, in Ohio. In February he's starting on a book tour...
Beah's book, A Long Way Gone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 229 pages), which comes out this month, is a breathtaking and unself-pitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all the innocence has suddenly been sucked out. It's a truly riveting memoir. But just as crucial to its success is its arrival at what might be called a cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier. The kid-at-arms has become a pop-cultural trope of late. He's in novels, movies, magazines and on TV, flaunting his Uzi like a giant foam...
...late Sir Roger Hollis, onetime head of Britain's counterintelligence service, M15, really a Soviet mole? Did the supersecret agency plot against the government of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson? These are some of the juicier questions reportedly raised in Spycatcher, a memoir by Peter Wright, who worked as an agent for M15 from 1955 to 1976. The book, which has not been released in Britain, has raised a furor because London has blocked publication of excerpts by invoking national security considerations...
Attempts to squelch publication of Spycatcher abroad, however, have not fared so well. In September 1985, the London government filed suit in an Australian court to prevent release of the memoir. So far, the testimony of government witnesses in the case has been embarrassingly inconsistent. British Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong has admitted that he was "economical with the truth" on the stand. The defense also noted that British officials allowed Journalist Chapman Pincher to publish a book in 1981 that contained similar material...
British efforts to uphold strict standards of secrecy were set back further last week when a Dublin judge rejected the government's request to block publication in Ireland of One Girl's War, a memoir by former M15 Agent Joan Miller...