Word: memoirs
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Americans who consider themselves sophisticated about sex may nevertheless be startled by the graphic content of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Grove Press; 209 pages). Not to worry. The memoir by Parisian art critic and magazine editor Catherine Millet managed to shock even the French...
...troubled teenager and the carpenter whose son he killed. But after all the politico-ethnic tsimmes and tsouris, the Jury (headed by U.S. director David Lynch) gave its top award, the Palme d'Or, to Roman Polanski's Holocaust saga The Pianist, an epic adaptation of the 1946 memoir by Jewish musician and Warsaw Ghetto survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman. Cannes this year was good for the Jews, and not bad for world cinema. It is always dangerous to find political significance in movies. Films are not news bulletins; they are dreams, acts of love, art and commerce. Still, the coupling...
...VANITY PRESS: Toby Young details his belly flop in the New York journalism pool in "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" (Da Capo; July 4). Kirkus enjoys the dish. "Kiss-and-tell memoir of Young's ill-fated stint as contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine... This skewering of celebrity worship at the nation's leading 'upscale supermarket tabloid' bears a distinct resemblance to shooting fish in a barrel; nonetheless, Young's language is energetic and engaging, making one wish (along with his father, apparently) that he'd find a worthier subject. Enjoyably bitchy specifics of Cond? Nast culture...
...movies or music. The slogans above were the work of Mary Wells Lawrence, the original girl in the gray flannel skirt, the first woman president of a big Madison Avenue firm. Wells was the godmother of a style of advertising that was witty, irreverent and anti-authority. Her memoir, A Big Life, tells the tale of her agency, Wells Rich Greene; her ardent wooing of clients; her even more ardent love match with Harding Lawrence, the impresario of Braniff Airways; and her battle with cancer. It's as engaging, effervescent and brave as the ads she created. --By Richard Stengel
...Anchee Min, author of the critically acclaimed historical novel Becoming Madame Mao, blatantly inserts all these elements in her latest offering, Wild Ginger (Houghton Mifflin; 217 pages). Min suffered a tumultuous childhood in China, finally escaping to the U.S., where she wrote a best-selling memoir. Novels like Wild Ginger are celebrated for their gripping historical accounts, but one suspects their success in the West is due in larger part to the authors' own sensational life stories. The book-jacket bios themselves play at the American immigrant fantasy: an attractive woman warrior babe escapes tyrannical regime, washes...