Word: memoirs
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Liang married an American, with whom he co-wrote his memoir, and he presently studies at Columbia University, but he clearly has not abandoned socialism His expressions of the fervor of past political movements can be excessive, but they reveal an undercurrent of loyalty. The influences shaping this loyalty started at birth. Heng's original given name (in China the family name comes first) was Dien-Jie, or "Good news from Dienbienphu", celebrating the Vietnamese victory over the French in 1954. The political naming of children is the first step in a long process of indoctrination centering on Mao which...
...states, including New Jersey last week, have adopted so-called Son of Sam laws, named for Multiple Murderer David Berkowitz, which lock up proceeds from books and other ventures to satisfy claims by victims or their survivors. One such moneyed killer is Jack Henry Abbott, author of the prison memoir In the Belly the Beast, who stabbed an aspiring actor to death in New York City in 1981. The widow, Ricci Adan, is using New York's Son of Sam law as one basis for getting damages from Abbott...
...respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth," said Voltaire. David Plante has given very little of either to the subjects of this memoir. Among the three "difficult women" in question, only Feminist Germaine Greer emerges from Plante's portrayal with a shred or two of personal dignity. Novelist Jean Rhys, who died in 1979, and Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, who died a year later, have been observed in the distorting half-light of their declining days, when illness and alcoholism had served to dim the mind and obscure the spirit...
...Midnight in 1939 was long gone. She spent most of their time together drinking gin and sweet vermouth and babbling away in a pitiful parody of her once considerable style and charm. Plante spares us few of the clinical symptoms of her senility. Emblematic of the mode of his memoir is a page-long account of the time that Rhys fell into the toilet when he failed to lower the seat after using...
Describing a colorful long-ago friend, Quennell almost casually defines a "character": "He was 'somebody,' a redoubtable human phenomenon, never totally silenced or permanently dismayed." The definition fits most of the people in Quennell's memoir, not least the author himself...