Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Memoirs and creative non-fiction.
Memoir is a genre.
You can view all genres, or you can search by language/region, editor/translator, era/movement, book authors, or year of edition.
It is essentially Nadezhda’s account of her own suffering and her country’s under the murderous, oppressive force of a dictator’s relentless purges of all opposition. Of art and culture. Of intellectuals and anyone who got in his way or was inconvenient.
Of all of the forms of memoir that I read, I feel particularly drawn towards the diary. There’s something about reading the immediate thoughts of the writer as they live through and work through the moment.
Cloudland Revisited is a hilarious ode to the movies, including all of those bad and cheesy ones that we watch and then wonder why hundreds of people came together to produce such a clunker.
A collection of shorter pieces, and longer prose, all of the writing is connected by Babitz’s love for Southern California’s most famous city and its environs.
I won’t spoil it for those of you who don’t know Byron’s reputation or just what shocking and scandalous shenanigans he got up to, but it was enough that his literary contemporaries were all talking about it.
This week I’m going to review two McNally selections from earlier this year, both of which are delightful non-fiction reads that I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen off the shelf.
Memoirs are tricky sometimes. I only read them when I either am interested in the time period or they focus on something that I read in a literary context.
Graves has the unique perspective of being in the middle and a bridge between the command that used soldiers as canon fodder and didn’t fight, and those that were the fodder and lost their lives so meaninglessly.
Usually, I would consider White Out too new to review here, but I made an exception because it has that certain something more that makes a book timeless. It looks at a subject in a way that is entirely unique and entirely new.
My summer of reading non-fiction continues with two selections — Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. The two books naturally go together and I’ve decided to review them together here because I feel like they end up completing each other.
