Word: memoirs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...second six-word collection, on love and heartbreak, will be out in January, followed by an edition of teen submissions. Smith, however, aware of the dangers of overextension, insists the micro-memoir won't become the next Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has dozens of iterations. "There won't be Six Words for the Pet-Food Lover's Soul," he says...
...vastly different political stripes project their own views." But those metaphors all suggest that he is some sort of passive instrument, when in fact his elusive quality is an active part of his personality. It's how you square the fact that Obama once wrote the most intimate memoir ever published by a future nominee yet still manages to avoid definition. At his core, this is a deeply reserved and emotionally reticent man. Consider this anecdote from Dreams from My Father: as a young man in New York City, he lived next door to an elderly recluse "who seemed...
Obama tells a parallel story in his memoir, the journey of a man raised by his Caucasian mother and grandparents who seeks his identity as an African American. Along the path, he was drawn to a number of older black men who argued that America's racial divide is absolute and unbridgeable. Obama recalls a visit as a teenager to the home of a black man his white grandfather considered a friend. To his surprise, the man explained that it was hopeless to think any white man could truly befriend someone black. "He can't know me," the man said...
...Obama's memoir displays more familiarity with the ideas of the far left than most American politicians would advertise. His interest in African independence movements led him to the seminal work of Frantz Fanon, a Marxist sociologist, and he speaks in passing of attending "socialist conferences" at the Cooper Union in New York City. But as Obama told TIME, this was in the Reagan years, and he was also reading works by conservative giants like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. He browsed among the ideologues but never bought in, he said. "I was always suspicious of dogma and the excesses...
...Solzhenitsyn published a memoir, Invisible Allies, in which he honors the people who helped him protect his writings from the state. It reads like a spy novel--coded messages, boxes with false bottoms--yet the danger was real. Were it not for these friends, from the fellow zeks (labor-camp inmates) who assisted him to the foreign journalists who smuggled out manuscripts, Gulag might not have seen the light...