Truth and Consequences
Amy Alexander : Non-Fiction
Who's more to blame in the Love and Consequences hoax: the faux ghetto girl or the credulous book editors and reviewers who so eagerly snapped up her story?
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Chafee Chastened
Eyal Press : George W. Bush
In his recent memoir, former GOP insider Lincoln Chafee boldly decries the Bush era.
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Lives on the Ground
Adina Hoffman : Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
New memoirs from Israel and Palestine offer the chance not to escape the political conflict but to grasp the way it impacts daily life.
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The Dot Matrix
Laila Lalami : Iraq
In I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, novelist Sinan Antoon explores themes of love, loss, identity and resistance in the face of political oppression.
2007
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The Nijinsky of Ambivalence
Morris Dickstein : Peace Activism
During a Vietnam War protest, Norman Mailer blustered and banged a generation's experience through his prodigious ego.
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Judging Thomas
A close look at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reveals a deeply conservative and increasingly bitter man.
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ART in America
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow : Reproductive Rights
Two new books explore the possibilities and ethical complications of assisted reproductive technology.
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Father of History
Christopher Phelps : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Bettina Aptheker's recent memoir has incited fierce debate over her father s legacy.
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Frank Schaeffer Goes Crazy for God
The original poster child for the religious right describes how he came to terms with religion and an odd upbringing.
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Greenspan and the Myth of the True Believer
His autobiography sheds light on what motivates hard-right political leaders to apply brutal economic shock therapy.
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The Passenger
Andrew Rice : Journalists & Journalism
In a posthumously published memoir, Ryszard Kapuscinski looks back on his life as a pathbreaking literary journalist who covered the Third World during the cold war.
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The Doctor Stories
Atul Gawande offers up a banal self-help manual for aspiring MDs, while Pauline Chen prescribes a dose of compassion.
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Clowns With Kalashnikovs
James Miller : Public Figures & Intellectuals
In his memoir, Régis Debray describes the evolution of his politics from his early days as a revolutionary to his later work advising the nominally socialist François Mitterrand.
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The New Face of Warfare
Child soldiering has become a defining feature of modern warfare. And the United States has been all too complicit in the trend.
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The Brown Decades
In an engaging new memoir, Carolyn Brown recollects her work with modern dance legends Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
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Goodbye, Baltimore
Kate Levin : African-Americans
In a kinetic and searching memoir, Ace of Spades, David Matthews confronts the identity questions that bedeviled him growing up biracial.
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The Anatomy of Fear
In his memoir Wish I Could Be There, Allen Shawn movingly details a life crippled by phobias.
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Newspapers...and After?
Newspapers may be dinosaurs in the age of new media, but they have enough life to guide--and even define--our politics.
2006
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Faraway, So Close
In his memoir Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern revisits his family's past and finds that he has never been quite at home.
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Class Consciousness
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford explores the contradictions of a social revolutionary possessed of an aristocrat's sense of the wrong and right kind of people.
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Not Dark Yet
Gore Vidal's Point to Point Navigation is a brave and continuous affirmation of life and an assurance that though the Republic has been betrayed, we are not to give up hope.
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French Lessons
The history of twentieth-century France depicts a struggle between the republican ideal of a unitary state and the shifting concerns of a pluralistic society.
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Death in the Family
Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost represents one man's search to find the truth about himself, his family and the Holocaust.
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Unsentimental Education
Christopher Hitchens : Australia
A new memoir by Robert Hughes reveals the idiosyncratic sensibility of a celebrated art critic.
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Woman Warrior
Iran Awakening is the memoir of Shirin Ebadi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to hold Iran's clerical regime accountable for its gross human rights violations.
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Dining With Devils
Wole Soyinka's You Must Set Forth at Dawn is a captivating memoir of the political and cultural dilemmas the author and activist encountered, and a compelling chronicle of Nigeria's turbulent past.
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The Sheltering Shy
Satirist Alan Bennett's Untold Stories is a packed suitcase of a book by one of Britain's finest writers.
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Will Greenspan Tell the Truth?
William Greider : Alan Greenspan
A Greenspan memoir will do fine in the marketplace. It is the kind of Important Book daughters buy for father's birthday. In the unlikely event Greenspan tells the truth, it would be a sensational bestseller.
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Truth, Fiction and Frey
Matthew Flamm : Publishing Industry
James Frey's faux memoir exposes corporate publishing as an industry so starved for bestsellers that it is unable to protect itself from fraud.
2005
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The Dying Animal
Gabriel García Márquez's new novella begins as an autobiography, but the passion-filled story of an old man, mad with love and clinging to life, weaves Marquez's other fiction into the tale.
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Monster's Ball
Party in the Blitz, the final volume of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's memoirs, is a chaotic, horribly fascinating memoir of a man who was a slave to love, an omnivorous intellect and a literary giant.
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I Wonder As I Wander
Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost plumbs the mysteries of losing oneself and finding oneself in the realm of the utter unknown.
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Optimism of the Will
Mike Davis : Journalists & Journalism
The rich legacy of former Nation editor and activist Carey McWilliams is on full display in three books.
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The Unexamined Life
Sean Wilsey's new memoir is a vulnerable, aching, unresolved account of growing up rich amid San Francisco's high society.
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Fables of the Reconstruction
Diane McWhorter : Civil Rights & Liberties
The Informant and Son of the Rough South examine the dynamics of moral choice through the lens of the civil rights movement.
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Clinton Agonistes
Eric Alterman : Media Analysis
John Harris's history of the Clinton Administration deserves much of the praise it has received, but it ignores the media's anti-Clinton animus.
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Southern Man
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington : Racism & Discrimination
Strom Thurmond's black daughter tells her story.
2004
2003
2002
2000
1999
This week: Can Barack Obama be a "People's President," or is his move to the center for good? Betsy Reed, Doug Henwood, Jo-Ann Mort, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Gary Younge debate. (13mb mp3)
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