It is the moral certainty, the holding himself accountable, that makes this memoir resonate so powerfully.
What makes this memoir so affecting is the absence of excuses, the refusal to blame others, the willingness to accept responsibility — more perhaps than the circumstances warranted.
The absence of her hindsight and analysis, combined with the poignant pathology on display, make this an unusually intriguing memoir.
The Hartinger memoirs make this fact abundantly clear, preserving for us that ineffable substance of the human soul — faith, hope, fear and courage — that shapes individual decisions and ultimately determines the course of actions, both large and small, that constitute the chain of events we know as history.
Als's beautifully written preface serves only to make the memoir's shortcomings, from its inconsistent writing to its skim-the-surface introspection, all the more blatant by comparison.
Ambrose makes clear in this memoir how practiced a writer of narrative he is, but seems unaware of his own punchy, all-American, short-sentence style and how superbly adapted it is to war stories.
That sort of battlefield observation cannot be learned from briefing books; it is what makes this less a memoir and more a how-to manual for anyone faced with a financial crisis.The author has always been something of an enigma.
"His own and his family's story is artfully woven" through the book, "making this both a memoir and a work of intellectual history," Alexander Stille wrote here in 1999.
The dreamy flow of association and freight of sensuous detail make the memoirs feel like novels.
But Gregory quickly realized that no amount of sanitizing was going to make those memoirs palatable to him, his boss - or the public.
