Word: memoirist
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DIED. ONNIE LEE LOGAN, 85, midwife and memoirist; in Mobile, Alabama. For half a century, Logan delivered the babies of impoverished black families. In 1989 she published her reminiscences, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, which became a best-selling feminist classic...
This was drama as rant, an explosion of bad manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight. The acid tone, at once comic and desperate, sustained Osborne throughout a volatile career as playwright, film writer (Tom Jones) and memoirist (A Better Class of Person). More important, it stoked a ferment in a then sleepy popular culture. Anger's curdling inflections and class animosities were echoed in the plays of Joe Orton and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a direct descendant), in Dennis Potter's savage TV scripts and in a generation of performers, from...
...secondary to the poems themselves, or should be. I imagine future generations of readers picking up A Different Person after, and only after, the poems have enchanted them already. Those future readers will find themselves diverted, but disappointed. I envision them clapping politely as Merrill the memoirist vanishes into the wings, while that "different person" who wrote so many good poems takes curtain call after curtain call...
...could possibly replace such an institution? Various names were bruited in the rumor mill -- stage actors, a few Hollywood eminences, novelist John Updike. But the winner turned out to be a dark horse: Pulitzer-prizewinning memoirist and New York Times columnist Russell Baker, 68, who originally declined the offer by saying, "I don't want to be the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke. I want to be the man who succeeds the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke." Baker was won over by the zeal of Christopher Lydon, a newscaster at Boston's WGBH, the station that produces Masterpiece Theatre. Lydon...
Nadezhda Mandelstam, the brilliant, bitter memoirist of the Stalin era, wrote in the early '70s: "Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses . . . have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens." Until last week the Russian character was judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were...