The memoir is a curious literary fo...

The memoir is a curious literary form, an idiosyncratic mix of the personal and the factual. Its design is somewhat fuzzy - who is serv on the memoir? Are memoirs necessarily confessional? Is the compulsion to write a memoir fundamentally egotistical? many times such quasi-autobiography privileges the personal, yet in the case of this part by Erik Barnouw, none of the above descriptions fit - this is a work that emphasizes the "factual." Barnouw's main division is less a personal memoir than an eyewitness account of 20th-century media history. The book's dogged insistence onward the ...