Word: memoirs
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...hired to murder Michelangelo-who had vocally sided with the republican cause. According to an old tradition, the great sculptor, who was then at work on the Medici tombs, hid in the bell tower of a church on the other side of the Arno. But ten years ago, a memoir was discovered in the handwriting of Giovanni Battista Figiovanni, the prior of San Lorenzo who was in charge of the Medici tombs project. "I saved him from death," the prior wrote of Michelangelo, "and I saved his belongings too." It was in this very room-well hidden by its trap...
Murdered Critic. Nicholas Meyer's first literary "discovery"-an unpublished memoir by Sherlock Holmes' sidekick Dr. Watson-pleased almost everyone. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution happily accounted for Holmes' whereabouts after he was supposedly drowned in the Reichenbach Falls. He was, of course, breaking his cocaine habit under the tutelage of Sigmund Freud. The pairing of these two clue masters on one case lent Meyer's pastiche a glittering patina of ought-to-have-been. Alas, Meyer has "found" yet another of Watson's tales, and it should not have happened to anyone...
Laconic Anticlimax. Her moment of truth with HUAC forms the heart of this slim memoir, Hellman's first-and long-anticipated-public word on her brush with McCarthyism. Two earlier autobiographical volumes, An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973), ignored this subject. Yet when the crucial scene in Scoundrel Time comes, it is a laconic anticlimax. The committee seems flummoxed by Hellman's strategy. When the chairman asks that her letter be read into the public record, Hellman's lawyers leap to distribute copies to the assembled reporters. Minutes later a voice is heard in the press...
...first novel, Barbara Howar, the swinging Washington hostess turned writer and television personality, updates a story as familiar as My Sister Eileen: old-fashioned girl comes to the big city because she is too special to settle down with a small-town Chevy dealer. In her memoir Laughing All the Way (1973), North Carolina-born Howar outlined just how special she was. Emerging from postmarital tristesse, she became a Washington gossip item. Names dropped like martini olives. Jealousies were disguised by a jovial rictus...
...excerpt reads like a political memoir, with all the characteristic flaws of that genre: first-person approach, great emphasis on the writer's own role, slightly wooden style, exaggeration of the bits of history the writer happens to know about first-hand. And even if a little positive revisionism on Johnson-particularly about his role in civil rights--might be a good thing, knowing that his Vietnam policy stemmed from his relationship with his mother seems, in the end, only to trivialize what happened there...