Word: memoirs
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Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir is at once a glorious success story and a seeming fairy tale From a humble Midwestern south in Sioux Falls, N.D., Fairbank soared through stints at Exeter. Wisconsin Harvard and Oxford, breezing academics and keeping a quirky sort of perspective on his meteoric intellectual development. I broke the cadence and entered Wisconsin instead of Harvard. This was partly because coeducation appealed to me. I knew how to study. What else was there...
...expensive, impractical and unAmerican. None are more eloquent-or surprising-than Richard Rodriguez. A Mexican American by birth who trained as a scholar of Renaissance literature, Rodriguez, 36, is a writer of rare precision and grace. His new book, Hunger of Memory (Godine; $13.95), is a perceptive and touching memoir about growing up in an immigrant family and about the emotional costs of studying his way to a secure place in the Anglo intellectual hierarchy. In the book, Rodriguez bears knowledgeable and compelling witness against America's recent methods of educating the underprivileged, and especially against bilingual education...
Another tenement symphony full of Cohens and Kellys, bubbling chicken soup and the sound of young Rachmani-noffs practicing scales? Simon is not ashamed of a well-timed note of nostalgia, but her memoir of girlhood in the South Bronx during the 1920s will be remembered for its discordances. Being part of the Old World and female is something the author cannot forget or forgive. Beneath its iridescent surface, her book is a hard, unsentimental look at a sort of "World of Our Mothers," a place of unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, abandonments and the desolate sense that a husband often...
...blocked by sirens, ogres and, in the literary Establishment, men who have been turned into swine. There is even a faithful Penelope. On the other hand, Cato Douglass is meant to be a star witness for the prosecution of society. In fact, the novel's memoir form ensures that he is always on the stand. His accusations are clear, but his evidence is not easy to sort out. Eloquence is frequently drowned out by bombast, and testimony too often has the imprecision of hearsay. For all its forthright bitterness, !Click Song is guarded. It is as if its author...
Indeed, the Watergate crew has turned out to be an incredibly literate band of co-conspirators, producing a stream of fiction and non-fiction that began, it seems with the first indictment Charles Colson, in his memoir, Born Again, told how Jesus--if no one else--has forgiven him for paying hush money to the Watergate burglars. In Blind Ambition, John Dean reminded us that he decided to snitch on Nixon for the good of the country--not to mention the success of his own plea-bargaining. And G. Gordon Liddy's bizarre autobiography, Will, left no doubt that...