Word: memoirs
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...know you're really famous when you forget a world leader is coming to lunch. In a new memoir, Bono, the singer recounts how one Sunday morning his wife answered the door at their Dublin home to find Mikhail Gorbachev "standing with a giant-- I mean giant--teddy bear" for Bono's son. "It was a loose arrangement I'd completely forgotten." It seems saving the world while remaining a rock god can be distracting...
...book, “Omaha Blues,” Joseph Lelyveld ’58 purposefully resists the memoir category, instead subtitling the text a “memory loop.” The framework of this generic rechristening helps Lelyveld avoid some of memoir’s more obvious traps, self-indulgence among them, but it is fundamentally less than honest: “Omaha Blues” is still a memoir, and only a fair one at that...
...Omaha Blues” is, in theory, the kind of memoir that justifies its existence almost without effort. Lelyveld has lived an exciting life against the backdrop of a hazily understood but intriguing childhood. Shuffled among relatives in Omaha, New York, and Alabama before matriculating at Harvard, he went on to work at the New York Times...
...focus. The country of memory Lelyveld establishes in “Omaha Blues” feels like a homestead awarded him by chance, a claim better left unworked in favor of more fruitful ventures. His experience reporting overseas would seem to be rich territory upon which to build a memoir, but those are not the years and the events he chooses to survey in this text...
...first three chapters read much like a traditional memoir, but halfway through the book we see a switch in tone and mission. Lelyveld begins the chapter entitled, “Ben,” by addressing his subject in the second person. His textual conversation with the long-dead Ben ends with a heartfelt declaration of purpose: “It may not always seem that way but I mean this exploration as a kind of homage; that and, secondarily, as an attempt to round out and perhaps put to rest an early chapter of my own life...