Word: lelyveld
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Like any other professional mom moving to a new city, Michelle Obama has been mostly preoccupied with settling her two young daughters into their new school. According to Obama's spokeswoman Katie McCormick Lelyveld, fashion and what to wear to the Inauguration have not been high on the list of priorities for the incoming First Lady...
...eulogists - I think it was his editor and pal, Joe Lelyveld (oops, why didn't I note this?) - closed by saying that Johnny would live on through the stories told about him by other journalists. I have two. One is more an image than a story. I met Johnny on my first trip to Iowa of my first Presidential campaign in 1975. I was working for Rolling Stone and trailing an entertaining if futile Oklahoma populist named Fred Harris; Johnny and I were the entire press corps. We traveled in a camper. Fred often went barefoot, sang country music songs...
...Instead, Lelyveld writes a great deal about the strange relationship between his mother, a woman with a doctorate in dramatic writing who felt trapped by her family’s needs, and father, a nationally renowned reform rabbi. Still more of his narrative attempts to reconstruct the life of a man named Ben Goldstein, a significant figure in his childhood. Goldstein is a complex character, so much so that he might merit a work all his own, but he really has no place taking up so much room in what is ostensibly Lelyveld’s story. He may loom...
...first three chapters read much like a traditional memoir, but halfway through the book we see a switch in tone and mission. Lelyveld begins the chapter entitled, “Ben,” by addressing his subject in the second person. His textual conversation with the long-dead Ben ends with a heartfelt declaration of purpose: “It may not always seem that way but I mean this exploration as a kind of homage; that and, secondarily, as an attempt to round out and perhaps put to rest an early chapter of my own life...
...research Lelyveld needs to carry out in order to create this “homage,” and in order “to round out…an early chapter of [his] own life,” creates a side-loop off the main spiral of his memory. Instead of being allowed to continue on our journey through the foldings of the author’s psyche, we are instead directed to the twin labyrinths of letters and libraries, caught up in a journalistic inquiry...