Recommended by William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, p. 136.

4952. Exiles, by Michael J. Arden (read 23 Aug 2012) This is an artfully written book, telling very intimate things of the author's life (if true) and of his parents. His father was the author of a famed book and was the subject of a Time cover story in th 1920's. This book jumps around, telling near the beginning of his father's death, then of the author's youth in Europe--he left there in 1940 and was in school in Canada and at St. Paul's in New Hampshire and then went to Harvard. He tells at length about his effort to get married when he left Harvard--telling intimate details which I presume are true--but never does tell us whether he eventually married the girl he was seeking to marry. He seems to have had a lot of trouble being comfortable with his unusual parents and in the course of the book tells much of their lives. The book is easy to read but not overly clear when the auhor does not want to be--but sometimes he is too revealing of things which his girlfriend I would think would not want to be revealed. ( )

The former television critic for The New Yorker's beautifully written memoir about his expatriate parents and their gilded but unfulfilled lives. Unlike most of the current crop of blunt, tell-all memoirs, this one is oblique and elliptical, and for that all the more heartbreaking. ( )