Autobiography and Memoir

Starting Out in the ’50s Starting Out in the ’50s

The best memoirs of recent years reveal "The Way We Live Now" as well as or better than most contemporary fiction.

Oct 23, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Dan Wakefield

The Life of the Party The Life of the Party

Interesting Times is a curiously feeble title for an autobiography, rather as if Noam Chomsky were to write an article called "Could America Do Better?" It carries, of co...

Aug 28, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Terry Eagleton

Our Man in Jazz Our Man in Jazz

Not many people can say they changed the world and make it stick. In Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, George Wein does.

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

Secrets and Lies Secrets and Lies

You would hope that the passage of fifty years might have cleared the passions that once inflamed the Rosenberg case.

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Philip Weiss

The Everything Expert The Everything Expert

Toward the end of his memoir, My Brother's Keeper, Amitai Etzioni recounts meeting with the political consultant Dick Morris.

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robert S. Boynton

The Believer The Believer

A reader knowing nothing of the 1990s might well come away from Sidney Blumenthal's lengthy account of The Clinton Wars with the impression that for eight years, Bill and Hilla...

Jun 5, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Tom Wicker

The Unrepentant Modernist The Unrepentant Modernist

Near the end of Parallels and Paradoxes, a recent collection of dialogues on music and society between the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Chicago...

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Russell Platt

The Liar The Liar

Steal this book.

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Emily Nussbaum

Throes of Creation

The Intuitionist The Intuitionist

Writers write by trying to find out what it is they're writing.

May 1, 2003 / Books & the Arts / E.L. Doctorow

Against the Genetic Grain Against the Genetic Grain

I first heard of Jon Beckwith in the mid-1970s, in a question framed by my genetics professor: Why would anyone willfully disrupt a research program designed to collect useful ...

Mar 20, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Jonathan Marks

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