Word: memoirs
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...cousin Gwen Raverat in a family memoir describes Darwin on his fourteenth birthday "lying with his long Etonian legs on the sofa in a negligent, grown-up attitude." While at Eton, Darwin engaged in quoting contests to see who knew Pickwick Papers the best. He practiced for these contests by seeing if he could continue out loud once he reached the bottom of a page. Certainly, Darwin would have ascribed to the Duke of Wellington's statement that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," for he considered the English public school, as epitomized...
...SAME TIME, As It Was is not written with the same attention to color and style that Saltonstall and Weeks used in Salty. As such, it reads more like a State Department briefing paper, or perhaps one of H.R. Haldeman's "talking papers" than a memoir or autobiography. For historians of American diplomacy in the '50s and '60s, this kind of detailed reporting will be valuable, but its lack of unifying theme or humorous readability makes As It Was overall a less attractive book than Salty...
Other authors may not be able to make that boast. Random House is suing A.E. Hotchner to recoup an $11,250 advance for a memoir that he completed but the publisher rejected as "unsatisfactory." Putnam has begun proceedings against Joseph Hayes (The Desperate Hours) to regain $33,750 for a book called Missing and Presumed Dead that Putnam refused to publish...
...recalls Kay Summersby Morgan in a forthcoming book. Past Forgetting-My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Summersby, who served as Ike's chauffeur, confidante and companion during much of World War II, wrote the book shortly before she died last year of cancer. An excerpt from her memoir, which appears in the December Ladies ' Home Journal, tells about off-duty hours spent together, mutual professions of love and, despite Ike's marriage to Mamie, plans for children. "We would sit on the sofa in the living room, listen to records, have a couple of drinks, smoke...
...Sultan of Swat, baseball's greatest player; of cancer; in Manhattan. A Broadway dancer from Georgia, Claire Hodgson was unimpressed when she first met Ruth in 1923. "His face and his stomach were fat, his legs like a chorus girl's," she wrote in her 1959 memoir The Babe and I. As his second wife, she helped curb the Bambino's bacchanalian excesses during their 19-year marriage. After his death, she became the custodian of his legend. Though the Babe's home-run records (60 in a season, 714 in his career) were surpassed...