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memoirs

What was it like to be Joan Didion’s personal assistant?

John Fea   |  June 13, 2024

Here is a taste of an excerpt of Cory Leadbeater’s memoir, The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: In the fall of 2013, my days and nights were wonderful and simple. I would wake in the morning to find […]

Episode 123: “Drew Gilpin Faust on Growing-Up at Midcentury”

John Fea   |  December 3, 2023

She was a privileged baby boomer who grew up on a horse farm in segregated Virginia. By her twenty-first birthday she had worked for peace in Communist Europe, traveled the country in the cause of racial justice, marched for voting rights […]

Historian Drew Gilpin Faust: “Education asks you to change”

John Fea   |  September 1, 2023

I am trying to get former Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust on The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast, but I think her publicist is ghosting me! 🙂 I am hoping that Faust might be willing to consider smaller […]

In 1970 historian Martha Hodes was held hostage by Palestinian militants. She is now revisiting those memories.

John Fea   |  June 7, 2023

American historians know New York University historian Martha Hodes for A Sea Captain’s Wife and Mourning Lincoln. But her latest book is different. In My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, Hodes writes about the time her plane […]

Pence cashes in

John Fea   |  April 9, 2021

Mike Pence’s Simon & Schuster-published memoir is scheduled for 2023, just in time for the next presidential election. The deal will put a $3-4 million dollar advance in Pence’s pocket. Here is CNN: Mike Pence has signed a multimillion-dollar, two-book deal […]

Former House speaker blames the January 6 insurrection on Trump

John Fea   |  April 7, 2021

In his forthcoming memoir, former Speaker of the House John Boehner has some choice words for Donald Trump. Maggie Haberman reports at The New York Times: John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, issues a stinging denunciation in his new […]