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The Quest for Reagan |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Lee Edwards |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,038 Words, 13,179 Characters |
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DUTCH
A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
Edmund Morris
New York: Random House, 1999
874 pp., $35.00
Biography is one of the most enduring forms of Western literature--the first biographical sketch was written twenty-five hundred years ago about the famous Athenian statesman Pericles. British and American writers have demonstrated a special talent for the genre. There have been traditional biographies like James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson; academic biographies like Douglas Freeman's George Washington; interpretative biographies like Catherine Drinker Bowen's Yankee From Olympus (about Oliver Wendell Holmes); and fictionalized biographies like Irving Stone's Lust for Life (about Vincent van Gogh). The central problem with Edmund Morris' long-awaited work, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan...
. . .
... eternal optimism for its future." The farewell, Morris says, has "the simplicity of genius."
But by this point, many readers--uncertain who is talking, the real Morris or the fake Morris--will not be paying very close attention. On balance, Dutch is not an "authorized biography" as advertised but a postmodern, deconstructionist experiment in autobiography. And the experiment is a failure.
(818 of 13,179 characters)
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