memoir

Book Review: “A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz” — Destined to Become a Classic

February 23, 2015
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Göran Rosenberg has written a calm yet passionate account of events after Auschwitz, a memoir marked by great intelligence and equally great emotional intensity.

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Fuse Book Commentary: Found in Translation — Out in the ‘Burbs

February 21, 2015
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Every writer fantasizes about passionate readers. These were as passionate as they come.

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Book Interview: Marion Elizabeth Rodgers on the Expanded “Days” of H. L. Mencken

September 25, 2014
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In The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition, H. L. Mencken comes off as a marvelously mellowed master, his trademark savagery smoothed over, its energy focused on generating a pungently picturesque vision of a vanished America.

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Book Review: Lucinda Franks’s Memoir – A Deeply Romantic Story of a May-December NYC Power Couple

September 1, 2014
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Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Lucinda Franks’s writing can be brilliant, deeply honest, and startling; other times superficial, sentimental, New Agey, or simply not credible.

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Book Review: “Little Failure” — Gary Shteyngart’s Memoir is Amusing But Thin

July 14, 2014
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Gary Shteyngart’s memoir proffers the rhetorical zest and caustic wit of his novels, but it lacks their satiric edge.

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Fuse Book Review: “Country of Ash” — Another Essential Holocaust Memoir

January 16, 2014
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We become increasingly aware that we are in the mind of a doctor who has taught himself to observe carefully, who has an amazingly strong will to survive, and who chooses not to waste precious time and energy on anger or revenge.

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Book Review: A Flimsily Built “House of the Interpreter”

October 31, 2012
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Instead of exploring his inner life at the time or his adult understanding of the institution that shelters him, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o draws a dispassionate and largely predictable report of boarding school life.

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Book Review: Memoir as Love Letter — “Into the Garden with Charles”

June 4, 2012
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Into the Garden with Charles reads like a great love letter: beautifully written, full of feeling, a document of an intimate connection that never lost its wonder for the author.

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Author Interview: Jay Atkinson’s Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man — Remembrance of Punches Past

May 26, 2012
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If Wordsworth was right in saying that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, than a rugby memoir is a punch in the face reconsidered from a hospital bed.

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Book Feature: A Conversation with Claude Lanzmann about his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare”

March 26, 2012
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Claude Lanzmann is a great raconteur who’s honed his narrative skills as a veteran journalist. His memoir is exuberant and provocative at its best; bombastic and superficial at its worst.

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