Word: memoirs
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SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS by John Updike (Knopf; $18.95). A wry, haunting memoir by an author who decided while he was still a young man that the printed word would disguise his flaws, only to learn that success leaves one painfully exposed...
...good memoir should produce shocks of recognition that are both intimate and historical, revealing truths about a person and about his times. Bernstein provides both, in abundance. Juxtaposing excerpts from declassified FBI files with tales of a childhood thrown into turmoil by the early postwar Red scares, he has created a new genre -- what might be called the investigative memoir. It combines the journalistic thrill of Watergate with the emotional punch of that most basic of literary themes, a boy's search to understand his father...
Loyalties is a candid, powerful memoir of his struggle to understand his ex- Communist parents. -- Nobel laureate William Golding winds up his seafaring trilogy. -- A rich tale of the I.R.A...
...many ironies weaving sinuously through this haunting memoir is the recognition that writing did not leave the author protected from the world after all. "Celebrity," he writes, "is a mask that eats into the face." Updike uneasily recalls his much publicized refusal, during the 1960s, to oppose U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a stance that left him odd man out among friends, fellow authors and members of his children's generation: "Authority to these young people was Amerika, a bloodstained bugaboo to be crushed at any cost. To me, authority was the Shillington High School faculty, my father...
...rigid and well defined: no blacks allowed. Now it has become a shifting barrier that can suddenly materialize, curtly reminding blacks that no matter how successful they may be, they remain in some ways second-class citizens. As black psychiatrist James P. Comer wrote in his family memoir, Maggie's American Dream, "Being black in America is often like playing your home games on the opponent's court...