Word: memoirs
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During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hellholes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead...
...Charing Cross Road, which played the West End and Broadway a few years ago, began as Helene Hanff's 1970 memoir of her 20-year mail-order affair with the London bookseller Marks & Co. Hanff, an aspiring Manhattan writer, never met Frank Doel, the antiquarian across the sea, yet their business correspondence about old books gradually took on the intimacy of love letters about literature. She described, with chatty eloquence, her sensuous safari through the world of words; he tracked down her requests with a consort's fond diligence...
...eased Secretary of State Alexander Haig out of office. In 1982, after the emotional Haig offered once too often to resign, the President handed him a note that began, "It is with the most profound regret that I accept your letter of resignation." Observed the astonished Haig in his memoir, Caveat: "The President was accepting a letter of resignation that I had not submitted...
...singular achievement of Cambodian Witness, a quiet, devastating memoir of this genocide, is to reveal the faces behind the numbing statistics and, more terrifying, to show how familiar they look. The fanatics who unleashed the bloodbath were usually, it seems, the people next door...
...olds take their own lives; in a single paragraph May laconically records the deaths of three of his siblings. Some of these horrors may seem almost routine to those who have seen the film The Killing Fields or read Molyda Szymusiak's The Stones Cry Out, a recently published memoir that covers much the same killing ground. Yet May is unusually sensitive to the monstrous ironies of a world turned inside out. While some peasants starved, others, suddenly allowed to eat, gorged themselves till they burst. Having outlawed all emotion and distinction, the Khmer Rouge found that they had also...