46 results for "Memoir"

Somebody's gotta tell it: the upbeat memoir of a working-class journalist

Newfield, Jack
Jack Newfield has covered it all: he has documented he unfolding drama of the 1960s; followed the boxing careers of Ali and Tyson; taken on city hall; and kept his integrity intact in the rough world of tabloid politics. Somebody's Gotta Tell It is the clear-eyed memoir of a journalist whose love for his country, and passion for his profession, has never wavered.
St. Martin's Press 2002-04-20 336 pages

War of words: memoir of a South African journalist

Pogrund, Benjamin
When Benjamin Pogrund, one of South Africa's most distinguished journalists, first began his career as a young reporter in the 1950s, "There had been little reason at that stage to believe that anything revolutionary was about to start." As the "African affairs reporter," and then deputy editor, it was Pogrund who first brought the words of black leaders like Robert Sobukwe and Nelson Mandela to the pages of South Africa's leading newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail. This was the period of apartheid in South Africa and for most of the next thirty years, the Rand Daily Mail was the country's liberal white voice against the tyranny of the Afrikaner Nationalist government. A riveting memoir and a complex commentary on apartheid and freedom of the press, War of Words offers an insider's perspective on one of the most turbulent, and arguably one of the most significant, periods in modern history.
Seven Stories 2000-03-07 381 pages

Speaking freely: a memoir

Hentoff, Nat
"Continuing the story that began in his widely praised Boston Boy, Nat Hentoff in Speaking Freely guides us through more than forty years of his life in journalism, a career as various as his passions, and follows our social history from the civil rights and antiwar movements to the most incendiary battles (such as abortion) of the present day. Hentoff first evokes New York in the fifties, when he wrote for the jazz magazine Down Beat and came to know some of the most talented jazzmen of all time--Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Dizzy Gillespie, to name only a few. He looks back to his apprenticeship under George Seldes and I. F. Stone, two unyieldingly independent journalists whom he credits with charting his direction in the field. And he recounts his associations with a wide array of Americans, from Malcolm X, who was a friend, to Louis Farrakhan, who has labeled Hentoff "the Antichrist" ; from Adlai Stevenson to John Cardinal O'Connor; and from the "utterly singular" editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, to uncelebrated heroes far afield from Manhattan and Washington. As a staff writer for the Village Voice and a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, Hentoff has gained a reputation as one of the nation's most respected, uncompromising, and controversial writers on civil liberties and on the difficult issues and wide-ranging forms of injustice manifest in our age." -- Provided by Publisher.
Knopf 1997-09-16 303 pages

Girl walks into a bar

Saroyan, Strawberry
A sophisticated coming-of-age memoir tracing a modern Holly Golightly from girl- to womanhood and from fantasy to realityFrom the glittering skyscrapers of Manhattan's media elite to the slacker haven of a fashionably low-rent L. A. bar, Strawberry Saroyan traces her journey not only from girl- to womanhood, but from fantasy to reality. A powerful and profoundly post-modern coming of age story, with a voice reminiscent of Liz Phair one moment and Mary McCarthy the next, Girl Walks into a Bar explores Saroyan's struggle not only with who she is and who she wants to be, but also who she is in the context of what she's supposed to embody: the iconic media-promulgated 'girl', a 21st-century version of Audrey Hepburn standing outside Tiffany's looking at diamonds. episodes of Saroyan's life and brings them to the page as a filmmaker might, zeroing in on the crucial 'scenes': losing her virginity, starting her own riot grrly magazine, falling in dysfunctional love. Yet all the while, she's trailed by that other black-clad girl, the Platonic ideal of so many modern young women's fantasies. Will they ever meet? That question lies at the heart of Saroyan's genre-bending meoir. Girl Walks into a Bar promises to be one of the most memorable debuts of the year. Strawberry Saroyan was born in 1970 and grew up in California. After graduating from Barnard, she was an editor at Conde Nast Traveler. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Elle and Vogue. She lives in Los Angeles.
Harper Perennial 2004 191 pages

Is anything happening? my life as a newsman

Lustig, Robin
During a career spanning more than forty years, the award-winning journalist and broadcaster Robin Lustig has lived in, worked in and reported from more than eighty countries. Now, in Is Anything Happening?, he tells the inside story of the triumphs and disasters he experienced along the way. He describes coming under fire in Pakistan and crashing the bongs of Big Ben on Remembrance Sunday. He was in Berlin on the day Germany was re-unified, and in Moscow for the final day of the Soviet Union. He also met some of the world's most revered, and reviled, political leaders, from Nelson Mandela to the 'butcher of Bosnia', Radovan Karadzic. And Lustig famously presented a special news programme covering the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales, just hours after the announcement was made. In this highly personal memoir, both funny and poignant, Lustig describes growing up as the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, retracing the journeys of his immigrant forebears, and standing on the very spot where his grandmother was murdered by a Nazi death squad in 1941. After more than thirty years of reporting from and about the Middle East - including three years based in Jerusalem for The Observer - he reflects on the continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and reaches a startling and controversial conclusion: that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 may well have been a mistake for both Jews and non-Jews.
Biteback Publishing Ltd 2017 416 pages

Inside Austria: new challenges, old demons

Lendvai, Paul
Austria experienced remarkable economic and social growth in the years following World War II, especially considering the troubled nature of its politics. A small, land-locked country, Austria has emerged as the European Union's fourth richest state, yet it still wrestles with old decisions and demons. Merging personal observation with rich historical scholarship, a renowned journalist and award-winning memoirist tracks Austria's unique trajectory, beginning the origins of its peoples and following through to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Paul Lendvai investigates whether Austrians have come to terms with Hitler s Anschluss and the Waldheim affair and how they have met the challenge of Jorg Haider s radical right-wing ascendancy. Lendvai identifies a positive moral toughness, internal cohesion, and social discipline within Austria, especially during the years of occupation and subsequent crises, such as the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Yugoslav wars. A probing study of Austria's long quest for nationhood, this volume offers a firsthand look at the factors and players that have influenced an evolving power.Praise for the German edition: Daring, exciting, unmasking...Lendvai presents hitherto hardly known facts and] incredible details.& mdash; NEWS (Vienna Weekly)Lendvai seeks to explain what Austria is like. He has succeeded exactly in this endeavor.& mdash; Die Wel
Columbia University Press 2010 199 pages

Unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader

Gornick, Vivian
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal 's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers , assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle , and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover . She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats . Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”
Picador 2021-02-02 176 pages

Impossible city: Paris in the 21st century

Kuper, Simon
"An entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little. When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the "Grand Paris" project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian cliches"--
PublicAffairs 2024 258 pages

Namedropping: mostly literary memoirs

Elman, Richard M.
In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people--how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway's small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand. How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, "Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?" We're on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer's bald forehead. Singer's great comic story of faith, "Gimpel the Fool," has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They're both still a long way from Stockholm. "Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?" he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer's motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.--from the Preface These are Richard Elman's candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist--among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman's teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject's art. To many readers, these persons are just "names"; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.
State University of New York Press 1998-01-01 277 pages

The end of romance: a memoir of love, sex, and the mystery of the violin

Barzman, Norma
Norma Barzman is a blacklisted writer living in Southern France. Henry Myers is her beloved cousin, a former member of the Algonquin circle who has found his writing talent diminished with age, and is living an isolated life in New York City. When Norma invites Henry to Italy to realize their mutual dream of traveling together to Cremona to write about the mysterious origins of violin making, neither one could have anticipated the explosive consequences of their journey. But their adventure opens a Pandora's box of long-suppressed emotions, family secrets, and forces each to reassess their feelings towards each other, and themselves.
Nation Books 2006 285 pages

Starstruck: fame, failure, my family, and me

Landesman, Cosmo
When Cosmo Landesman's American parents decided to move their young family to London in the swinging sixties, it was not to pursue a quieter life on this side of the pond. Quite the reverse: it was out of unbridled, unashamed lust for fame and fortune. But things did not go according to plan, and as a child Cosmo found himself charged with raising his starstruck parents and trying to cope with the publicity stunt of their 'open marriage'. Over the years he wrote press releases, blurbs and proposals for their plays, film treatments, novels, book ideas and demo tapes. He found himself playing the roll of creative midwife, personal manager, publicist, psychoanalyst and apologist. Not any more. In this hilarious memoir he finally lays bare his extraordinary childhood and the twists and turns of his parents' bizarre desire for the spotlight - and how they were always doomed to failure.
Macmillan 2008 355 pages

Biographies and Stories of Abraham Lincoln Emil Ludwig's Story of Lincoln; Excerpts from Newspapers and Other Sources (Classic Reprint)

Emil Ludwig
Excerpt from Biographies and Stories of Abraham Lincoln: Emil Ludwig's Story of Lincoln; Excerpts From Newspapers and Other Sources A man of wide experience, a man of insight, meeting him at this stage, will be inclined to regard him as a budding poet or an imaginative writer in the making. And that he is. He writes verses and reads them to his friend. He ponders deeply over the things he reads. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Fb&c Limited 2018-01-20 106 pages

Battling editor: the Albany years

Rosenfeld, Harry
Recounts the transformation of two daily newspapers in the face of economic downturns and sweeping technological change. In 1978, Harry Rosenfeld left the Washington Post , where he oversaw the paper’s standard-setting coverage of Watergate, to take charge of two daily papers under co-ownership in Albany, New York: the morning Times Union and the evening Knickerbocker News . It was a particularly challenging moment in newspaper history. While new technologies were reducing labor costs on the production side and providing ever more sophisticated tools for journalists to practice their craft, those very same technologies would soon turn a comparatively short-lived boom into a grave threat, as ever more digitally distracted readers turned to sources other than print and other legacy media for their news. Between these boundaries, Rosenfeld set about to do his work. Picking up where his previous memoir, From Kristallnacht to Watergate , left off, Battling Editor tells the story of how Rosenfeld and his colleagues transformed two daily publications into alert and aggressive newspapers even in times of economic downturn. Bringing the investigative habits he had honed in his years at the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post , Rosenfeld’s objective was to tell the fully rounded stories of the region’s cities, suburbs, and rural towns, with awareness of both their achievements and their shortcomings. Furthermore, the misuse of power, whenever it happened, whether in city hall or the state capitol, in courtrooms or prisons, or in hospitals, corporations, community organizations, was to be exposed, and those accountable were to be held responsible. More importantly, however, Rosenfeld’s account is enlisted in the growing call to arms for all who cover the news and all who consume it. Written at a time when the credibility of news organizations is under attack by those at the highest levels of government, Battling Editor is a full-throated defense of fact-based journalism and hard-hitting reporting at the local as well as national level. “Harry’s book is often about tough decisions, and it stands out as a handbook on how to live an ethical life in the news business right now. Is it possible to tell the truth all the time? Sometimes. But this is an instructive narrative—especially today when the truth is such a rare commodity in the White House and Congress, and the financially beleaguered press is itself under threat as an enemy of the people. Harry and his family lived in Nazi Germany, and escaped it in 1939. A large part of his subsequent life has been an ongoing war against fascism, racism, and political criminals. This book explains how he waged that war on a daily basis in the newsrooms he managed so well, and for so long.” — from the Foreword by William Kennedy “Harry Rosenfeld made a choice. He left an exciting job at the Washington Post for the chance to do what so many editors dream of—become the guy in charge of two vibrant regional newspapers. What fun he had as a boss—being responsible for stories about local heroes, crooked politicians, and the day-to-day doings of a capital city. There also is a tinge of nostalgia in Harry’s memoir, for the kind of local reporting Harry lived for has all but disappeared in today’s newspaper world. Local coverage has been stripped away in newspaper after newspaper as all are facing dwindling readership and disappearing income.” — Seymour M. Hersh
Excelsior Editions, an imprint of State University of New York Press 2019 262 pages