Results tagged “memoir”

The NY Times obtained an early copy of late Senator Edward Kennedy's memoir, True Compass. While he apparently doesn't add too much detail, Kennedy did call the 1969 incident at Chappaquiddick—where he drove his car off a bridge, killing passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, and did not report the accident—"inexcusable" and suspects the scandal might have hastened his sick father's death. The Times also reports the book mentions his drinking (which worsened after brother Robert's death), his divorce with first wife Joan, his brother John's assassination (he accepted the Warren Commission's report) and "Among other things, it says that in 1984 he decided against seeking the presidency after hearing the emotional objections of his children, who, it says, feared for his life." Kennedy also described his competitive family, "As I think back to my three brothers, and about what they had accomplished before I was even out of my childhood, it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up." The memoir was originally planned for next year, but Kennedy's illness pushed the release date forward to September 14.

The NY Times and Daily News speak to former students of NYC public school teacher turned bestselling memoirist Frank McCourt, who passed away on Sunday. One woman told the Times, "We all thought, ‘He’s such a genius, what’s he doing just teaching us?’ Everybody thought he was destined for bigger and better things. And when he became a global phenomenon, we felt it was justice." Another revealed to the News, "I was not a big reader back then, until he taught us 'Moby Dick.' I mean, the whale was in our classroom. I read everything ['Moby Dick' author Herman] Melville wrote after that. All of a sudden, I spent all my time in the library because of Frank McCourt."

Frank McCourt, the NYC public school teacher turned bestselling author of Angela's Ashes, a memoir about his harsh childhood, died at age 78 today in Manhattan. He had been ill with meningitis and his cause of death was metastatic melanoma.

After yesterday's local headlines screaming that Joe Torre had ripped his former Yankee associates in his new memoir "The Yankee Years," today scribes continued to dig for dirt between the two sides. They weren't getting it from GM Brian Cashman, who told them that Torre called him from Hawaii to smooth things over yesterday, unsolicited. The GM emphasized, "He was a fantastic manager and you couldn't ask for any more than what he did for us." Then there's A-Rod, Derek Jeter's superstar stalker and pre-Madonna prima donna, who suffers a few digs in Torre's book. Torre reveals he told Rodriguez to at least get his own coffee, only to have the slugger then show off his self-purchased cup of joe to his manager. Torre says, The point was to just be one of the guys. He didn't get it." A friend of ARod's tells the Post that the book is a "final act of desperation" and that "Alex's reaction is he hasn't received a signed copy yet."

The local tabloids are foaming at the mouth with the first revelations from former Yankee skipper Joe Torre's soon to be released tell-all book about his time with the team. Torre was famous for his stoicism in his decade as manager and for keeping drama to a minimum, a notable feat among the New York sports media. But initial word is that Torre's memoir lets off some steam after his unceremonious exit last year by taking swipes at ARod, GM Brian Cashman and not surprisingly, the Steinbrenners.

Ladies, gentlemen, Anderson Cooper: Olympic gold medalist and America's sweetheart Michael Phelps is in town. Sure, Phelps-mania was put on the back burner during that whole election thing, but it has re-arrived, and if you want to stand in his superhuman shadow then you best get yourself over to the Barnes & Noble at 5th Avenue and 46th Street by 12:30 today. He'll be there promoting his new book, No Limits: The Will to Succeed, which documents his entire life up through his big wins in Beijing. We suppose if he can swim at world record speeds, then it makes sense he wrote a memoir in three months.

In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Brooklyn-based writer Benjamin Nugent combines a peripatetic history of the word “nerd” with accounts of the various kinds of people it is most often used to describe. The book includes an autobiographical dose; one section called “My Credentials” details Nugent’s early 90s adolescent exodus from d20-style probabilities. On page 3, Nugent fittingly discloses: “when I was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.” But American Nerd isn’t a massive, single subject history, and it isn’t straightforward memoir. The book is often poignant, especially when Nugent revisits the proving grounds of his young nerd-hood, and more often than that it is funny. The nerd you recognize in its pages may very well be yourself.