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By Jared Diamond
By Gay Talese
$23
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 Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — The sad fact is that all traditional modes of dissent, whether they’re protest marches or boycotts or sit-ins, must ultimately fail because they are generally powerless to prevent their own inception. What does that mean?
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By Lauren B. Davis —
“When my mother was angry with me, which was often,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her new memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” “she said, ‘The devil led us to the wrong crib.’ ”
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By Mel White — James C. Hormel’s transformation from a confused and closeted gay kid to the nation’s first openly gay ambassador is chronicled in his memoir “Fit to Serve.”
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 Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — It said DOG on his food bowl, and because he showed no signs that he’d ever learn how to read or write, she decided that he must be dyslexic. So she called him GOD.
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By Mr. Fish — Not only does the story testify to the power of humor to sustain a real-life parable celebrating the ingenuity of a man hoping to escape the mundane, but it is also proof that the scenic, circuitous route through life may be preferable to the more direct.
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By John Dean — As I mentioned to friends when I started reading Dick Cheney’s memoir, I was doing it so others would not have to. And, as a precaution, I did it alone in case my head exploded. It did not. This book is a bomb, but not the exploding kind.
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich minister of propaganda, in 1941. Former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to have taken the famous Nazi’s advice in his new book, “In My Time.”
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Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, in his memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century,” interviews Albert Speer about his 15 years as a prominent Nazi and “Hitler’s architect.”
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 Flickr / cliff1066 (CC-BY)
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Rosa Parks, “mother of the civil rights movement,” was discovered recently to have written a first-person account of a young black housekeeper being sexually accosted by a white man, but whether she was describing something that happened to her or was writing a work of fiction is uncertain. (An earlier version of this Truthdig item was based on an AP report that changed afterward when new information surfaced.)
Posted on Jul 29, 2011
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 Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — The mustache that I was looking for on a full-grown woman was the mustache that an 11-year-old boy discovers on himself, with his face four inches away from the bathroom mirror, that all of a sudden makes his whole existence seem just on the brink of becoming worthwhile.
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 Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — This was in 1979 when I was 12, and we were all doing it for Zeeker, who hadn’t been the same since he saw the Easter Bunny drop dead at Pennebaker’s Drugstore three months earlier.
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What’s former defense secretary and amateur poet Donald Rumsfeld to do now that the Bush II years are over and done but to hit the road on a book tour and keep insisting his choices made the world safer?
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 AP / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Is it just us, or does the publication of a revealing memoir, including details of childhood molestation and abuse, by a first-term senator herald yet another sea change in the game of political publicity? Of course, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts isn’t just any new arrival ...
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By Andy Borowitz — After it emerged that entire sections of George W. Bush’s new memoir, “Decision Points,” were plagiarized from books by former aides, The Borowitz Report asked our followers on Twitter to come up with the best plagiarized first line for the book.
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 White House
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By Ruth Marcus — I read “Decision Points” and it turns out that George W. Bush is the Edith Piaf of fiscal policy: He regrets nothing.
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 AP / LM Otero
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By Robert Scheer — The Harvard MBA is the degree that George W. Bush and his last treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, had in common, and their shared ignorance as they presided over the collapse of the U.S. economy is on full display in the former president’s newly published memoir.
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 Flickr / Grace (CC-BY)
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It’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but Jimmy Carter is still harboring a grudge from his health care showdown with Ted Kennedy. Asked about his use of the words “irresponsible and abusive” to describe the Senate lion, the former president said Kennedy opposed his health care proposal out of spite.
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 White House / Paul Morse
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The former British prime minister’s fall from boy wonder to lapdog caricature has a lot to do with George W. Bush and their shared Iraq adventure. In his new autobiography, normally the place for reflection and re-evaluation, Blair defends both his relationship with the American president and the mess in Mesopotamia.
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 facebook.com/georgewbush
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The Decider has become The Poker. George W. Bush is officially on Facebook, where he’s now updating fans on his latest post-presidential blunders. We can’t wait to see how he fallows Farmville, makes up words in Scrabble and posts inappropriate comments on Angela Merkel’s wall.
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Christopher Hitchens reveals a life in contradictions in “Hitch-22,” a brilliant memoir that is at turns comic, self-deflating and sexually frank.
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What happens when you mix a massive oil spill with a hurricane? When Obama finally decides to negotiate with the Taliban, what will he ask for? And how did Jane Austen become such a big celebrity? Answers to these and other vexing questions after the jump.
Posted on May 27, 2010
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 White House / Krisanna Johnson
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Laura Bush’s new memoir reportedly features a scene at a German hotel fit for a Poirot mystery: The president and his entourage suddenly taken ill as the Secret Service frantically searches for poison. The hotel in question says Mrs. Bush is probably just trying to sell books.
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 gawker.com
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Actually, it may not be possible to fully get ready for this sort of thing, but George W. Bush is gearing up to release his memoir, “Decision Points,” which apparently needs no subtitle to complicate matters. We’re talkin’ ’bout the Decider, people! And now, let the jokes begin.
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“The Opposite Field,” a memoir by Jesse Katz, is a moving meditation about baseball, politics, and the unease of negotiating a new kind of American place.
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Bill Maher couldn’t contain his glee on Friday night’s episode of “Real Time” while rattling off some alternative titles for Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” had it been ghostwritten by several famous writers—even some long-dead ones.
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 dhs.gov
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One sinister li’l tidbit from former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s upcoming tell-all won’t do much to change the Bush administration’s reputation for string-pulling on as many governmental fronts as possible: According to teasers released by his publisher, Ridge was pushed by Bush & Co. to raise the terrorist threat level on the eve of W.’s second electoral victory in 2004.
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 AP / Louis Lanzano
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Bernard Madoff’s connection with the New York-based Jewish charity Hadassah has become fraught above and beyond the economic level since the organization’s CFO, Sheryl Weinstein, claimed that she and the fallen financier had an affair, which she details in her upcoming memoir, “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me.”
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 AP / Ron Edmonds
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney maintained an elusive stance, to say the least, during his years in the White House, but since leaving office he’s made himself more visible and vocal on the public stage. For his next act, he’s working on a memoir—but somehow the term tell-all doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill in this particular case.
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Is the pastoral arcadia of the country life far from derivatives and emissions and the other excreta of our modern cities all that it’s cracked up to be? Two new memoirs give readers who don’t want to stir from their armchairs to take up farming an insider’s look.
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 AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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Dick Cheney, former vice president, defense secretary and White House chief of staff, has signed a reported $2 million deal with Simon & Schuster to publish his memoirs as a public official in four administrations. Bets are it’ll be a thriller marked with torture, stolen elections, war and, hopefully, no sex.
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Two memoirs—Eve Pell’s “We Used to Own the Bronx” and Christopher Buckley’s “Losing Mum and Pup”—demonstrate, each in its own way, that all that glitters is not gold and that the price exacted by extreme social anxiety is very high indeed. A feast of the higher gossip and raw meat for social anthropologists.
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What’s it like when your father is an Iranian Marxist and your mother is a Jewish-American renegade and both are devoted organizers for the Socialist Workers Party?
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The publication of Sontag’s early diaries provides a revelatory look at the self-inventions of the late writer.
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 White House / Shealah Craighead
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Americans have always preferred Laura Bush to her husband, and now Scribner, an imprint of a division of a subsidiary of Sumner Redstone’s National Amusements, is hoping to capitalize on that appeal with an “intimate” new memoir set for 2010 release. There’s no telling how much the better Bush is getting paid, but “millions” is a safe bet. Update after the jump.
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 AP photo / J. Pat Carter
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The fluidity of memory aside, this is getting a little strange: Following in the footsteps of James Frey, Misha Defonseca and Margaret Seltzer, yet another “memoirist,” Herman Rosenblat, has admitted that his supposedly true story, “Angel at the Fence,” is a bit lacking in the truth department.
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By Joe Conason — To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see “Frost/Nixon,” with Frank Langella’s remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him.
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 Flickr/sskennel
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Huh! So Sarah Palin’s White House bid didn’t pan out, but the story of her two-month sprint to Election Day with John McCain will likely translate into big bucks from an eager publishing house. But what should Palin’s tome be called?
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 barackobama.net
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Nothing like winning a presidential election to send your book sales through the roof, as Barack Obama and his presumably gleeful publishers are discovering.
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 Flickr / M@rcopako
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If you want to read a personal account of Michael Phelps’ training philosophy, you’ll have to wait until December, when the Olympic swimming champion’s “Built to Succeed” hits store shelves. As much as we value the written word around here, is it really necessary for every celebrity to pen a memoir? There are trees at stake, after all.
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“Audition” details the life story, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, of a pioneering journalist-entertainer who reported the news while making it in ways both admirable and troubling.
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 z.about.com
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If authoring a war against innocent civilians abroad and civil liberties at home wasn’t enough, George W. Bush is toying with the idea of writing a book upon leaving the Oval Office in January.
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 defectiveyeti.com
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Scott McClellan is making an important stop on Capitol Hill as he continues his book tour to tout that obscure memoir he wrote about being Bush’s press secretary. According to The Huffington Post, McClellan has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the Valerie Plame identity leak case and possibly other entries in the list of Bush’s Greatest Hits during McClellan’s time as presidential spokesman.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
Mr. Bush said he was “surprised” that Mr. McClellan had written a book to criticize him because, he explained, “if you’re trying to communicate some criticism to me, a book is pretty much the last place you’d put it.”
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Scott McClellan, the man voted least likely to spend his summer vacation at Bush’s Crawford ranch, paid a visit to “The Daily Show” on Monday night to revel in his newfound infamy among certain White House denizens—oh, and to promote some book he wrote called, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” Heard of it?
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