Autobiography
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Basketball, volleyball, punchball, stickball, dodgeball, box ball, box baseball, baseball, softball, stoop ball, touch football, handball, kickball, wall ball. Ping-pong. Hit the penny. Never played tennis or tackle football. Never even heard of soccer. What have I forgotten?
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"Joint" is a word that in the course of my lifetime has engaged in some serious shape-shifting. When I first encountered the word, joint (derived from the Latin jungere, to join) was simply a place where two pieces of wood were glued together or where one's bones were articulated to produce a wrist, elbow, or…
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It's that time of year once again — time to get 2024 out of the starting gates with force and vigor. I'm all into self-improvement, as everyone knows. So here are my resolutions. 1). Sleep longer, and stay in bed later in the morning. No need to bounce out of bed. It's warm and cozy…
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Ian McEwan, Black Dogs; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; Ian McEwan, Amsterdam; Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side; Thomas Halliday, Otherlands; Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Jonathan Raban, Bad Land; David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers; Michael North, The Baltic; Niall Williams, This…
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In the late 40s and 50s, Marty Glickman was the radio voice of the New York Knicks. As a basketball announcer, he was simply the best. Most of us from that era, especially Brooklyn guys, can still recall in our mind's ear his melodious, accurate and rapid-fire recreation of the game. "Gallatin to Braun on…
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The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as…
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Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was…
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I must confess that I had never heard of architect-entrepreneur Robert Stern until I read Martin Filler's NYRB review of Stern's recent autobiography — which is called Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. How could I have been so behindhand, so ill-informed? Filler's evaluation of the memoir is sharp-elbowed. He plainly doesn't like…
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Here follows a list of some of the many activities that I definitely, excruciatingly, do not wish to perform before I kick the ol' kettle. My life is perfectly complete as it stands, and I feel no psychological pressure to engage in any of these anxiety-ridden ventures. Nope, all the pressure is on the side…