Most Americans take their system of government for granted, as if Moses himself had delivered the Constitution engraved on marble tablets.

As ways of writing about a past, memoirs and autobiographies, although in practice they may often overlap, are different undertakings.

On the page, Patricia Highsmith could inspire a law-abiding citizen to become a willing accomplice to murder, at least within the realm of the imagination.

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