Word: memoirs
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Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction...
Armand Hammer's memoir of his 88 tumultuous years begins near the end, with accounts of his part in 1986 negotiations to clear the way for U.S. physicians to help Chernobyl's victims, and then in freeing hostage U.S. Journalist Nicholas Daniloff and a would-be Soviet emigre, Geneticist David Goldfarb. These incidents demonstrate his unusual role as a back-channel conduit between U.S. and Soviet officials. They also reflect the pragmatic approach Hammer takes toward the Soviets, his business partners on and off since the early 1920s. Readers will search in vain for indignation about the Soviet record...
...teacher was a harsh martinet, and Segovia was unmoved by the sound of the instrument. "The violinists and cellists I heard in the Granada of that time seemed to extract catlike wails from the violin and asthmatic gasps from the cello," he wrote in Segovia, his 1976 memoir. "But even in the hands of common people, the guitar retained that beautiful plaintive and poetic sound...
...Part memoir, part self-help manual, Everything to Gain combines some rather obvious advice on how to stay healthy (do not smoke, fasten seat belts, exercise regularly) with strikingly candid personal reflections. After the 1980 presidential defeat, Rosalynn reveals, she was reluctant to give up the dream that her husband might again run for President and win. Daughter Amy, then 12, announced that she did not want to live in Plains, Ga. "You may be from the country," she said. "But I'm not." (She went to boarding school instead.) On a lighter note, the Carters write that...
...authors whose chronicles have appeared in these pages: Anwar Sadat, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Alexander Haig and Dissident Elena Bonner, the wife of Physicist Andrei Sakharov. This week TIME's cover story, a lengthy excerpt from Chinese Author Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, is a memoir of a very different kind. History will record not that the author shaped large events but that she simply survived to write a gripping personal account of her imprisonment between 1966 and 1973, during China's Cultural Revolution. Cheng, now 72, whose only crime was being born into a wealthy, land...