Word: memoirs
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...want of trying. The whole corpus of Updike's fiction before Couples amounts to a memoir of his boyhood. His mother has called those writings "valentines" to the friends and family back home in the small (pop. 5,639) Pennsylvania Dutch farm town of Shillington, three miles from Reading, where John was born. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, is a cosmopolitan, well-educated writer herself (four stories in The New Yorker since John blazed the way), and she has always loathed everything about Shillington. She admits now to having broken up a high-school romance of John...
...style at all. He did not even take a mistress. The only thing he shared with other French kings was a passion for hunting. Between 1775 and 1789, he ran down 1,274 stags. Apart from recording that, his journal struck a low for an age of compulsive memoir writing. Its most common jotting was "Nothing." That, in fact, was the sole entry in his diary on the day the Bastille was stormed...
...AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH, by Louis Keren. The Washington correspondent of the London Times casts a sympathetic eye on the U.S. political system. TO BROOKLYN WITH LOVE, by Gerald Green. The excitement of Brownsville during the Depression is evoked in this memoir disguised as a novel by the author of The Last Angry...
...PRESIDENCY Memories of Uncle Lyndon Working from a lode of salvaged notes and firsthand memoranda, Evelyn Lincoln assembled a 1965 memoir, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, that gave readers a faithful slavey's-eye view of the boss she loved and served as personal secretary. Her second installment, Kennedy & Johnson, about to be published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, wastes little love on J.F.K.'s succes sor. Her book's opening description of L.B.J., in Florida at their first meeting after the 1960 election, speaks of him as "Heavy. Heavy footsteps. Heavy body. Heavy, slow-moving...
...Galbraiths were not as joyless as most of their neighbors, whom Galbraith limns in the bittersweet memoir, The Scotch, but the children were still imbued with their neighbors' stern Calvinist ways. "Sexual intercourse," he wrote, "was, under all circumstances, a sin. Marriage was not a mitigation so much as a kind of license of mis behavior, and we were free from the countervailing influences of movies, television, and John O'Hara." After a not particularly brilliant high school career, Galbraith entered Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph, "not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world...