Word: memoirs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Eric F. Goldman. Instant history, like instant coffee, can sometimes be remarkably palatable. At least it is in this memoir by a former White House aide who sees L.B.J. as "an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances...
...past. Today Presidents have taken to employing historians as personal aides, partly in the hope that they will be written up lovingly. Sometimes they are-witness Arthur Schlesinger's study of John F. Kennedy. And sometimes the joke is on the Chief Executive. Eric Goldman's bestselling memoir of White House life with Lyndon Johnson emphatically belongs in the latter category...
Died. Agnes Boulton Kaufman, 75, second of Playwright Eugene O'Neill's three wives; of an intestinal obstruction; in Point Pleasant, N.J. Her marriage to the iconoclastic author lasted eleven years before ending in divorce because, as she wrote in her memoir, Part of a Long Story, O'Neill wanted a "wife, mistress, mother and valet." Their life was like a battle scene played in a refrigerator: she cared little for the theater and enjoyed parties; he was a recluse whose only outlets were quiet drinking and dramatic writing...
...stuntmen were frequently killed. The many interviews that comprise two-thirds of the book share in common a true nostalgia for physical pain, for the ordeals involved in creating motion pictures honestly, unhampered by union restrictions, production supervision, and general professional laziness. Many statements, among them Nancy Carroll's memoir of shooting MGM's The Water Hole in the heart of Death Valley (the casualty rate approaching Stroheim's for Greed, the most famous horror story of Death Valley's filming), suggest strongly that the first American film-makers willingly demanded a verisimilitude unknown to most of today's artists...
Patchwork Life. Willis Mosby shares Braun's detachment, if not his ethnic background. An American Christian gentleman and noted action-intellectual, he has withdrawn to Mexico to write his memoirs "in the vein of Sir Harold Nicolson or Santayana or Bertrand Russell." He deals at length with his patchwork life; his fundamentalist upbringing, his Rhodes scholar days, his unorthodox interpretation of John Locke, a stint for Hearst in Spain, wartime service with the OSS, and his views on F.D.R., Comte, Proudhon, Marx and Tocqueville. But then Mosby decides that his memoir needs a touch of humor...