Word: mifflin
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...first volume of Schlesinger's memoirs, "A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950" (Houghton Mifflin; 557 pages; $28.95), is a rich, spirited performance. Schlesinger moves energetically down the years, meeting everyone worth meeting, dispensing opinions (sometimes brilliant, sometimes merely partisan and captious, sometimes dead wrong, as when, early on, he pronounces Harry Truman to be a corrupt mediocrity). T. S. Eliot wrote, "The trilling wire in the blood sings beneath inveterate scars,/ Appeasing long forgotten wars...
...strong perhaps, given the cast of public characters at the time, but it was not all that far from the truth. As David Nasaw's superb new biography, The Chief (Houghton Mifflin; 687 pages; $35), makes compellingly clear, Hearst was the most powerful, the most self-centered and the richest media baron in the world. He controlled newspapers that reached 20 million readers, a news wire service, magazines, newsreels and feature-film companies and radio stations. Each enterprise was tied to the others, creating "synergy" before anyone had heard the word. Hearst said he was serving the nation, but what...
Short of homicide, how far will a man go to escape his background and reinvent himself as an unaffiliated member of the human race? If you are Coleman Silk, the gifted self-liberator in Philip Roth's new novel, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin; 368 pages; $26), you first tell your fiance that your widowed mother is dead when she is not. Then you tell your mother that she will never be allowed to see her future grandchildren...
People hankering for a peaceful, rustic existence should probably curl up with Edna O'Brien's splendid new novel Wild Decembers (Houghton Mifflin; 272 pages; $24) before moving to the sticks. Things are not as pleasant in the tiny western Irish village of Cloontha as the scenery suggests. Michael Bugler has arrived fresh from a sheep farm in Australia to claim the land left to him by a deceased uncle, and the newcomer's presence stirs up the villagers. Especially agitated is Joseph Brennan, whose ancestral farm borders Bugler's property. Brennan tries to be neighborly, but his true spirit...
Lowry began her first children's book, based on her memories of her sister's death, in 1976 upon the request of a Houghton Mifflin editor who had seen one of her short stories in a magazine...