Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation Random House, 1998Hardcover, 412 pagesISBN 0-375-50202-5 When my father-in-law died just about a year ago, I realized that it wouldn’t be long before everyone with personal experience of World War II would be gone. Even the youngest people who went off to that war are in their mid 70s now. So […]
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Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith Pantheon Books, 1999Hardcover, 275 pagesISBN 0-679-44240-5 I’m not a big fan of the poor-me-I-had-a-lousy-childhood school of memoir writing that’s so popular today, so when Lamott began her book with declarations of her childhood search for parental love, approval, and acceptance, and with acknowledgement of an abortion and drug
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Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work Carbondale, Ill., 1978Hardcover, 196 pagesISBN 0-8093-0883-5 Highly Recommended Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism, which treated
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Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls Random House, 1997Hardcover, 267 pagesISBN 0-679-40297-7 Joan Jacobs Brumberg teaches in the fields of history, human development, and women’s studies at Cornell University. In this cultural and historical study, she describes how growing up female has changed over the last century and how, in
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Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman HarperCollins, 1998Hardcover, 242 pagesISBN 0-06-017596-6 Recommended Compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), begun in 1857, required more than 70 years and the help of hundreds of volunteers who submitted examples of the usage of individual words. The editor of the project was Professor James Murray, a scholarly former
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Cheever, Susan. Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker Simon & Schuster, 1999Hardcover, 192 pagesISBN 0-684-80432-8 Recommended My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord’s Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini. She showed me how to tilt the gin bottle into the tumbler with the
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Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) W.W. Norton & Company, 144 pages, $14.95 hardcover ISBN 0-393-02601-9 In the “Introduction,” feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun explains the topic of her book: There are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she
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Jessop, Violet. Titanic Survivor edited and annotated by John Maxtone-GrahamSheridan House, 1997Hardcover, 238 pagesISBN 1-57409-035-6 Violet Jessop went to sea as a stewardess on an ocean liner in 1908. She continued as a stewardess through the glory days when a transatlantic ship crossing was as much a society event as a mode of transportation. She retired
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Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton Houghton Mifflin, 1998Hardcover, 326 pagesISBN 0-395-65489-0 Billy Tipton was a musician and entertainer who flourished during the 1930’s and 1940’s. When paramedics arrived to treat Billy after he had collapsed at home in January 1989, Billy’s adopted son William, who had placed the 911 call,
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McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir Penguin, 1998Paperback, 161 pagesISBN 0-14-026530-9 Jane Taylor McDonnell is the mother of an autistic child. When she set out to write a memoir about her experience, she found there were no instruction manuals on how to write what she calls “crisis memoirs.” Living
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