Taken together, they amount to a memoir-within-a-memoir, a small tour de force of memory, experience, and representation.
Such efforts are, at bottom, attempts to conceptually embody a law, as epitomized in Helmholtz' "The Conservation of Force: A Memoir" (Kahl 1977, pp. 49 50).
Had Lanzmann done nothing more, he would be remembered chiefly, and faintly, as a sort of intellectual and political Zelig; his most enduring trace would likely have been his prominent cameo in Beauvoir's memoir "Force of Circumstance" (1963).
Alexander Stille is the author, most recently, of the family memoir "The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace," from which this essay is adapted.
Mr. Stille, whose recent family memoir, "The Force of Things," includes a tale about his Jewish grandfather in Fiume, said, "Palatucci was the beneficiary of that".
But perhaps none have had the force of "What Happened," the new memoir by Bush's former press secretary, Scott McClellan, which has zoomed to the top of the best-seller lists (including the Book Review's) and brought fresh scrutiny to an administration that had been all but invisible during this election season.
In her memoir The Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir looks back at The Ethics of Ambiguity and criticizes it for being too abstract.
That photo book, "Catalogue Déraisonné," is there, too, full of celebrity-thick snaps of the good life, a memoir of a force of nature.
Confessions confounded that theory by the sheer force of its style and launched the memoir of intoxication on to the literary scene.
Ms. Barrymore carries this uneven but ultimately rewarding screen adaptation of Beverly Donofrio's memoir with the sheer force of her plucky charm.
