Word: memoirs
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WHAT I SAW AT THE REVOLUTION by Peggy Noonan (Random House; $19.95). From a former speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the most amusing and self-effacing political memoir likely to come out of the 1980s...
...Noonan, who retired from politics with Bush's Inaugural Address, has written the funniest, most richly textured, nervously self-effacing and deftly observed political memoir likely to come out of the 1980s. What I Saw at the Revolution succeeds because it violates every rule of corridors-of-power autobiography. As Noonan explains at the outset, "Most White House books have been written by men and have an unspoken subtitle: What I Did with Power. Many have another: If Only They'd Listened to Me, the Fools! But I didn't have much power, and sometimes if they'd listened...
Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson (1982). This would be a rarity in any era, a literary memoir free of rancor and score settling. The author recalls her first husband, John Berryman, and his friends, among them Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, men who left behind some splendid poems and some sad histories of alcoholism, despair and suicide. But here they are young and joyful amid the possibilities of words, ignorant of the sadnesses that await them...
...after Henry Luce slated him as heir apparent, Hedley Donovan still professes uncertainty as to what virtues the Time Inc. founder saw in deciding he would become (as he did from 1964 to 1979) the company's editor in chief. But readers of Donovan's urbane, frequently self-chiding memoir will be able to guess. He blended a heartland bourgeois regard for American values with a worldly disdain for puffery. He took pride in being able to change his mind -- notably, on Viet Nam and Richard Nixon. In chronicling his life from the rectitude of a Minnesota boyhood...
...cast of felines. Author and illustrator Barbara McClintock places her 19th century tale onstage, where everything is expressed through the dramatic pose and the pregnant paws. Minette is pursued by the rakish Count Bisquet and the worthy Lionel. In the end she spurns them both to write her scandalous memoir, which becomes an overnight success. If there is any justice, so will this comic biography...