Nation Topics - Autobiography and Memoir | The Nation

Who can recall the late Stokely Carmichael's first name and not
associate it with the two most incendiary words of the 1960s, Black
Power?

The best memoirs of recent years reveal "The Way We Live Now" as well as
or better than most contemporary fiction.

Interesting Times is a curiously feeble title for an autobiography, rather as if Noam Chomsky were to write an article called "Could America Do Better?" It carries, of course, the sting

Not many people can say they changed the world and make it stick. In
Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, George Wein does.

You would hope that the passage of fifty years might have cleared the
passions that once inflamed the Rosenberg case.

Toward the end of his memoir, My Brother's Keeper, Amitai Etzioni
recounts meeting with the political consultant Dick Morris.

A reader knowing nothing of the 1990s might well come away from Sidney
Blumenthal's lengthy account of The Clinton Wars with the
impression that for eight years, Bill and Hillary Clinton

Near the end of Parallels and Paradoxes, a recent collection of
dialogues on music and society between the conductor and pianist Daniel
Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony

Steal this book.

This essay is excerpted from E.L. Doctorow's new book, Reporting
the Universe (Harvard).