Word: memoirs
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Debate over the justification for the takeover continues as well; just in the five years since we marked the last anniversary, controversy over the takeover was reignited when former Dunster House Senior Tutor Roger Rosenblatt published hisComing Apart, a memoir of Harvard at the time of the takeover. Like so much of the 1960's--the abstract concept of "the sixties" is condemned by conservatives as the root of every problem from drug abuse to the Clinton presidency and praised by liberals as the heyday of the civil rights movement--University Hall has been inflated to near-mythic status...
...also the author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin...
...until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance...
...they're not really about anything so vulgar and transitory as news. Then they launch a publicity barrage, invariably including a press release written in traditional journalistic "pyramid style"--that is, with the scoop on top, where it belongs. ("ALBRIGHT SAYS CLINTON NEVER TOUCHED HER. In her just published memoir, Woman of the World, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright denies reports in former White House press secretary Mike McCurry's recent memoir, The Soul of Discretion, that President Clinton...") In essence the press release is the real reporting medium...
What is shocking this time around is the juxtaposition of reportage and fiction, creating a creepy sense of disjuncture in the collection. Ellroy has never been one to be bashful. One can read his memoir My Dark Places to get the full story on how he whored, drank and drugged most of his youth away. He readily talks about his heady days of breaking into houses on the other side of the track to sniff rich women's panties. Candor is not a surprise to anyone familiar with his work...