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...quite different ways, memory is the focus of two distinctive new reminiscences. Burning the Days (Random House; 365 pages; $24), subtitled Recollection, is by James Salter, a prime specimen of that increasingly endangered subspecies, the "writer's writer." Salter is vastly admired by critics and fellow novelists for a rich, evocative style and storytelling marked by understated elegance, but his sales are well below the mega-level. His peers are right: Salter deserves a larger audience...
...past involves a "continuous remixing of memory and forgetting." For much of 1980, while working on a doctorate in history, Garton Ash lived in East Berlin. Inevitably, he became an object of interest to East Germany's omnipresent secret police, known by the acronym Stasi. In The File (Random House; 262 pages; $23), Garton Ash, now 42, tries to reconstruct that year behind Berlin's Wall by comparing his private notes from the period with what he found in Stasi's newly opened records. Going further, he located and interviewed some of the informers and bureaucrats who had spied...
...invited, "as if black women remaining in the community and quietly taking care of business while the men are elsewhere is anything new." Though Nelson argues convincingly that black women need to raise a collective howl of rage, her disorganized mix of social and political commentary, personal story and random musings on everything from menopause to high heels produces a whiplash effect...
What provokes more conspiracy theories than a Mel Gibson summer movie? Last week's announcement that publication of Disney chairman MICHAEL EISNER's autobiography is being postponed "indefinitely" by Random House. The book's planned October release just happens to be a month before the trial date set for former Disney movie chief JEFFREY KATZENBERG's lawsuit against Disney. Katzenberg's attorney won a discovery motion to get all transcripts, notes and computer disks used for Eisner's book that pertain to his client, but so far those materials have not turned up. A Disney spokesperson denies any link between...
Both, as it turned out, and the Washington Post book critic and columnist Jonathan Yardley engagingly examines this double identity in Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (Random House; 255 pages; $23). Yardley makes no inflated claims on behalf of his subject: "Fred was a professional writer, although only one of his three books [A Fan's Notes] will long remain in print." But Exley (1929-1992) intensely interested and exasperated his readers, relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and the victims of his odd-hours telephone monologues, among whom Yardley and this reviewer number themselves. "What a piece of work...