Word: memoirs
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...better than Goethe. She writes, in fact, very much like James. Conundrum is a lover's leap removed from those case histories of sexual maladjustment that dish up undigested gobbets of Freud liberally sauced with prurience and self-pity. The book is a brief and graceful, often witty memoir of Morris' inner and outer life. The outer life proceeds from a happy childhood in an artistic upper-class Welsh family (he read Huck Finn, cherished animals, and was taught to "wash my hands before tea"), through years as a choirboy at Christ Church College in Oxford, some tune...
Based on The Water Is Wide, Pat Conroy's memoir of the year he spent teaching in an all-black elementary school on a backward island off the South Carolina coast, the film features paradisiacal vistas, an enormously engaging performance by Jon Voight in the title role ("Conrack" is the way his students insisted on mispronouncing Conroy's name)-and a profound shortage of dramatic conflict. The children, needless to say, are adorable. They are rendered all the more touching by the superintendent of an inhumane school system and an inflexible principal (the former represented by Hume Cronyn...
...these intuitive and somewhat pat perceptions, nagging self-doubts dangle at the end of each memoir. But instead of developing their restive psyches, Prose disappointingly cuts the players short. Armanda the dwarf, for example, acknowledges the tension that arises from Flaminio's perfect typecasting, from his refusal to recognize her private soul. But the plot does not allow time for her to develop potential feelings of self-worth that can replace an identity culled from the glory of the stage. Instead, her memoir trails off in confusion, with a lame admission to Flamino that "I myself was never quite sure...
This small and admirable memoir records the experiences of a young Dutch student who spent a year and a half as a novice monk in a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery. As might be expected, the author shows a deep respect for the teachings of Zen. What makes his account extraordinary, how ever, is that the book contains none of the convert's irritating certitude, and no suggestion that the reader rush to follow the author's example...
...Revolting Cowardice." Mrs. Mandelstam makes few concessions to those who have not read Hope Against Hope. Her new book, which has also been superbly translated by Max Hayward, is a sprawling but inhabitable annex to the first volume. It is as if in memoir form she has staked out the private living space that is so scarce in the communal world of the Soviet Union...