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| Prescribed reading: medicine in literature A new book prize turns a welcome spotlight on a rich and varied tradition of writing about health and medicineLast night I attended the prize ceremony for the inaugural Wellcome Trust book prize, awarded to "outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine". I was attracted by its slightly barmy mixing of literary disciplines. And I was impressed by the calibre of the judges, among whom were Jo Brand (chair, and 10 years a psychiatric nurse) and Raymond Tallis, one of the few people whose writing clarifies, rather than further muddles, my understanding of neuroscience.The shortlist, which can be viewed in full here, comprised two novels and four non-fiction books ranging between autobiography, investigative journalism and biographical essays. The winning book, Keeper, Andrea Gillies' memoir of caring for a relative with Alzheimer's, hasn't received a single review since its publication in May – something this award will, one hopes, remedy.Speaking with Brand and Tallis before the ceremony, I wondered which books they thought best demonstrated the qualities they were looking for. Interestingly enough, they both chose novels. Brand described Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as being about "a very specific time in American history, when psychiatry was very unsophisticated and nurses were really no more than prison warders". Tallis opted for Mann's The Magic Mountain, which "brilliantly fictionalises medicine, the thrill of science, and the mystery of the human body."The prize's website plays a similar game, suggesting García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Ian McEwan's Saturday as likely nominees from the past. But the possibility exists, of course, to reach back much further in the literary record than this. Illness, certainly, was present at the birth of western literature: just think of Apollo, angered by Agamemnon's insulting of the priest Chryses, sending a plague to ravage the Greek army in the Iliad. Medicine is present, too, albeit in primitive form: the many wounds Homer describes are anatomically accurate, while Machaon's herbal remedies and palliative care are doctoring of a sort. Four hundred years later Thucydides describes an Athenian plague in graphic detail in The Peloponnesian War. In myth, scholars believe an historical plague was the impetus for Hercules's battle with the Lernean Hydra, the creature's multiplying heads representing its rapacious spread. The writings of the most famous Greek physician of all, Hippocrates, were the first to separate medicine from religion, and disease from supernatural causation. He lends his name to a text – his authorship of it is uncertain – which defines the ethical responsibilities of doctors to this day, give or take a reference to Apollo or two. Herophilos and Erasistratos wrote influentially of the pulse and anatomy, respectively, but most of what we know of their work comes from later commentaries by the Romans Galen and Celsus. Many of these works, it should be said, are important for the learning they contain rather than the reading experience they offer. There are exceptions, though. Vesalius's On the Workings of the Human Body, published in 1543, not only revolutionised medicine by introducing the concept of body as machine, but also exhibits a prose style that consciously emulates Cicero.One hundred years after Vesalius, Oxford don Robert Burton was exploring the role upbringing and culture play in mental illness in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Sir William Osler called this "the greatest medical treatise written by a layman". Beyond that it can claim to be one of the most erudite and fascinating books ever written.Treatises and textbooks are all very well, but what of other fields? Fiction is riddled with doctors, from Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith to HP Lovecraft's Herbert West; Burroughs's terrifying Benway and Proust's buffoonish Cottard. Voltaire used a doctor, Pangloss, to lampoon Leibniz's theory of the "best of all possible worlds", while HG Wells' Dr Moreau stands as a warning against untrammelled medical research. Kafka's most enigmatic short story is named for a country doctor. As for illness, plague provided the basis for Daniel Defoe's early work of faction, A Journal of the Plague Year, while Camus used it to signify fascism's spread in La Peste. Syphilis is another favourite, cropping up in Measure for Measure and Othello, Candide (Pangloss cheerily loses an eye and ear to it), A Tale of Two Cities and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Perhaps its most resonant appearances, though, are in Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, where it powerfully underlines the hypocrisy of late 19th-Century moral codes. Finally, of course, there are the writers who were themselves doctors: William Carlos Williams, Rabelais, Chekhov, Bulgakov, the late Michael Crichton, Somerset Maugham, Schiller and Karl Georg Büchner, author of Woyzeck. In the case of all these, their profession had some bearing on their art. Even these examples, though, are mere nicks in a huge body of work. I need help in order to cut deeper into the subject – I haven't even mentioned nurses, for starters. What are your favourite works of literature that place health, illness or medicine at their heart? I can't match the Wellcome Trust's £25,000 prize, I'm afraid; just genuine interest and a pleasant bedside manner.FictionHealth, mind and bodyScience and natureAwards and prizesChris Powerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A life in books: Mavis Gallant 'I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write'A couple of months ago Mavis Gallant had a dream. A messenger came to the door carrying a cardboard box with a lid on it. On top was written "Mavis Gallant" in big letters – and underneath it "Bad Prose". "I was devastated. Devastated for days. I thought, they aren't telling me the truth."In fact, Gallant is often cited as one of the best living short-story writers, inspiring reverence among devotees of the form, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, who credits her as the most significant influence on her own writing. At the age of 15 Gallant told a friend – who reminded her of it many years later – that when she grew up she would live in Paris and be published in the New Yorker. Next year she will have spent 6o years in her adoptive city and has had nearly as many stories in the magazine as John Updike."They were all in a strange land and out of context," one of the characters reflects in Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first (of only two) novels, written in 1959. A Canadian in Paris who has devoted her life to writing, she is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally. Reading too many of her stories at one time leaves the reader feeling strangely adrift, the world slightly askance. She has travelled extensively, usually alone, across Europe. "Only personal independence matters," she once wrote, quoting Boris Pasternak, and this might well be her motto.We meet in Le Dôme, a notorious hangout for writers and artists in bohemian Montparnasse and long a favourite with Gallant, who lives what used to be for her just a nip around the corner, but is now – due to increasing frailty – a short taxi ride away. She first came to the restaurant when she arrived from Montreal in 1950. "It was a terrible winter and I used to come here because it was warm and I didn't have any electricity in my apartment. Can you imagine – the French giving anything away free!" she says, her handsome face crumpled by a chuckle. Now 87, she is a famous regular herself; the only time she is unable to secure her own spot – the cosy "Picasso booth" – is when Paloma, the artist's daughter, is in town."I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river," she writes in the introduction to her Selected Stories. Indeed, the life and work seem almost indistinguishable: she speaks in a succession of stories, as effortlessly as bubbles blown through a loop, smaller tales attached to larger ones. She is pin sharp: if you aren't careful, and push for direct answers, the stories burst in your face. Her osteoporosis is forgotten (sitting for long periods, and even writing, are painful) as figures from her past, or characters from her fiction – both seemingly as real to her as each other – are recollected and reanimated. She recalls how, reading one of her stories, "The End of the World", to a group of bored schoolchildren, she started to cry because she had forgotten the ending and suddenly realised one of the characters was going to die – and her eyes, just a minute before creased with laughter, fill with tears across the table. "I could only stop myself by saying: 'It's only a story, pull yourself together.'"Gallant's life seems richer in stories than most. She made the first of her "escapes" when she was 18, turning up on the doorstep of her old nurse in her childhood city of Montreal, leaving her mother in New York. An only child, she was shunted between a bewildering number of boarding schools. When she was 10 her father, an amateur artist, died, and her mother's remarriage left her feeling abandoned. This unhappy childhood seeps like a stain throughout her fiction in the recurring neglected children and strained filial relationships – "You have to observe it and overcome it," she says now.When she was 21, she got a job on the English-language weekly, the Standard, "dead and buried now", only, she says, because all the men were at war. One of the highlights was interviewing Sartre, and she promised herself that one day young people would come to interview her. Journalism was her "apprenticeship", and while she enjoyed thinking up features ideas, occasionally getting into trouble for her outspoken views and chafing against the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, after six years she handed in her notice. "I liked the life, but it wasn't the life I wanted." She felt she couldn't go on living in her native city, and she chose Paris because of "the black and white films, the paintings. I thought that France must be enchanted magic. I wanted to be among those people."She was 28 and already divorced (she had briefly married a musician called John Gallant) with one story accepted by the New Yorker. She gave herself two years, vowing that if she could not live on her writing, "I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way. Whatever happened, I would not enter my 30s as a journalist – or anything else – with stories piling up in a picnic hamper." In a fateful episode, this was very nearly prophetic. Gallant was living in Spain at this time, sending stories to her agent in New York. "I admire you very much," he wrote back. "But the New Yorker have rejected your work." She was "dead broke and desperate". Cold and hungry, she took refuge in the American library in Madrid, where she came across one of her stories in an old copy of the New Yorker. She wrote to the fiction editor, William Maxwell, to reproach him, not because she hadn't received any payment, but for not sending her proofs. He replied to say her agent had told them she lived in Capri and to write to the General Post Office there as she didn't want to be disturbed. "It was a terrible thing to do to a young writer," she says. She later heard that the rogue ("the naughty agent" as she calls him now) had been killed in a car crash.It was, however, the beginning of a long and fertile relationship with the legendary Bill Maxwell, to whom, she writes in the introduction to the Selected Stories, she owes everything. Gallant can – and does – count on one hand the stories among her prodigious output that were not published in the New Yorker. After he retired Maxwell reread all his writers' work, including Gallant's, and he wrote to her apologising for not running in full the novella The Pegnitz Junction, which she still considers to be her finest work. "He wrote 'my mind must have been out for lunch.' What editor would do that?"One of the most striking things about Gallant's work, including The Pegnitz Junction, is its cinematic quality, shifting perspectives and chronology, resulting in what Lahiri calls "narrative that refuses to sit still". Gallant is dismissive of analysing or explaining her work, and distrustful of academic attempts to do so. "If I thought about what I do, I think I'd stop writing. Really," she says with feeling. "I would tell you if I knew. It just happens." For her "the first flash of fiction is like a curtain going up on stage, and you wait to see what's happening. The characters aren't speaking to me, exactly, but I get lines of dialogue. I know who they are, what they do and what they are saying to each other. And I know more than they do, because I know about all of them."The characters also come with names, like photos with captions underneath, which can cause problems: Florence in Green Water, Green Sky, is schizophrenic, and in Gallant's mind was originally called Caroline, the name of her goddaughter. "But I had to finish the novel with her name because I couldn't have written it otherwise." Brief, intense and technically dazzling, Green Water, Green Sky was conceived and is published as a novel, but Gallant wasn't satisfied. "I felt there were only four important things – so I broke the novel into four stories." (The New Yorker ran the first three, declining the last because it can't be understood in isolation.) Her only other novel, A Fairly Good Time, is out of print. Has she, like other writers committed to the short form (Alice Munro, for example), felt under pressure to write a novel? She sinks her head in her hands with a dramatic groan. "Publishers send me so many new novels – I hardly dare answer the postman. A lot of it is just stuffing between the important things. In between is nothing."For a year in the early 80s, she was writer in residence at Toronto University, "a completely useless job. You are with people who have no talent whatever, and if they had they wouldn't come to me." The only good thing was that she had 20 per cent off at the campus book store. To those students who showed any promise she would give copies of Nabokov, or EM Forster, "always good for the soul". Otherwise, she would give them Raymond Carver.Despite the inexorable popularity of the short story on creative writing courses, she thinks teaching fiction is a "dead loss. I never asked for help. I didn't even show my friends what I was doing." She has only two words of advice for aspiring short story writers: read Chekhov! "Anybody who has the English language and doesn't read the wonderful translations of Chekhov is an idiot." She also admires Eudora Welty, Marguerite Yourcenar and Elizabeth Bowen, although she was disappointed to read Bowen's letters to her lover Charles Ritchie, whom Gallant knew. "She turns out to be a snob. It is a division in the brain, between what one is as a writer and what one is as a person."The structural mastery of her stories, coupled with their fluid morality – you are not entirely sure, which, if any, of the characters, deserve sympathy (well-intentioned "liberals" come in for a particularly hard time) – has led to accusations of emotional coldness. In the New York Review of Books in 1980 – in which Gallant was reviewed alongside the "arresting new talent" in English fiction, Ian McEwan – VS Pritchett found her "brittle". While Pritchett concluded that, despite her "sharp", "clever" comedy, "Miss Gallant has compassion", John McGahern, writing in the New York Times more than a decade later, complained that her "witty, controlled prose is functioning at the expense of her characters". "I don't sit weeping as I write," she retorts impatiently.On a more positive note, she recalls a review by John Updike, in which he wrote that she doesn't "belittle men, that she seems to really like men". Indeed, her chat is scattered with recollections of flirtatious exchanges, as light and colourful as confetti: giving bothersome Italians the slip by vanishing into art galleries; going gambling in Monte Carlo; even being asked out to dinner over the coffin at a funeral by the brother of a Jewish poet who had killed himself. But a committed reader of Gallant's fiction might be forgiven for asking if she believes in love. "Oh yes! Oh of course. I don't say that it will last 50 years. I never intended to marry. I fell in love!" Was she ever tempted to remarry? "No."But that doesn't mean she was always alone. Just as in her 20s she gave herself two years to prove she could be a writer, so in her 30s she promised that she would give herself two years to see if she could live with someone else. She left almost on the day. "I went to stay on a farm outside Salzburg and every morning I woke up and thought 'I'm free.'" She hardly wrote at all during the two years. "You have to stop and think – 'Oh I must get the bread for supper' – I didn't even eat bread because I didn't want to get fat! I didn't like being half a person with half of another person attached. It wasn't his fault, he didn't do anything wrong, anything mean or nasty. As a couple you only ever see other couples. It was so boring, I was so bored," she says with feeling. "I was going out like a light. But if everyone was like me the human race would run out."Although she writes about children with beguiling empathy, she knew she never wanted to have any of her own. To illustrate the point, she tells another story. After lunch with a lawyer friend on a trip to Montreal in 1955, he drove her back and stopped in front of "a very charming looking house with vines growing up it. 'I'd love a house like that,' he said. And I said, 'It's not for me.' Saying, 'How was your school day?' every evening . . . I'd run away. I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write."Which for the next few decades was all she did. But it wasn't until the 60s that she feels she fully developed her own style. Gallant has been rereading her work from this period for a new collection of her early and uncollected stories, published by Bloomsbury in the UK this month as The Cost of Living. It opens with "Madeline's Birthday", the very first story accepted by the New Yorker. Ironically, today when being Canadian seems almost to be a criterion for the job description of short story writer, Gallant was only the second Canadian to be published in America's most prestigious magazine and feels her nationality was a "handicap." "To them I was like an Eskimo with talent. A hick. They were surprised when they got 'Madeline's Birthday', which takes place outside New York."Three of these early stories were turned down by the New Yorker because they were considered "inauthentic". This early rejection has continued to haunt her, feeding her fear that she might have "inherited a flawed legacy", like her artistic father, afflicted with "a vocation without the competence to sustain it". When the collection was published last year by the book imprint of the New York Review of Books, she "nearly fainted for joy", when the editor told her that one of the rejected stories is "authentic even for New York even now". "I had put those stories out of my mind. I took their word for it that they were no good. But I did know what I was doing. I did know what I was talking about. And the stories work."She is very proud that her fiction is firmly rooted in the time in which it was written, and it was at her insistence that the Selected Stories are chronologically ordered and dated. It wasn't, she says, until the Selected Stories were published, and received such positive reviews, that she really felt able to relax. "I felt like Queen Alexandra – when she said 'They do like me'."But then there's that dream, she remembers sorrowfully – even in a year when she's had seven books published (reissues in different languages). The Spanish edition of the Selected Stories is particularly pleasing to her. It took the translator two years, and because Spanish sentences are longer, it is even fatter than the English edition squatting unignorably on the table between us. In a strange echo of her nightmare, of which Gallant herself seems unaware, she recalls its arrival: "I had forgotten even signing the contract. The messenger delivered it. It had Mavis Gallant on it" – and not, of course, a word about bad prose. "It is divine", she says. Perhaps she can finally lay those doubts to rest.Lisa Allardiceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Jacques Tati and French film comedy Jacques Tati was a master of burlesque. Emilie Bickerton on a French revolutionaryIf you told Jacques Tati that his flight was delayed, he'd say terrific – and settle down to watch what he considered "the best movie of the year": people passing by. Observation gave the director all the material he needed for the four films he made over three decades. Tati liked to call himself "the Don Quixote of cinema", which captures his combination of idealism, imagination and generosity. Monsieur Hulot, his charming, self-effacing but out-of-synch comic creation, is the character with whom he is most often, and fondly, associated. But Tati's work cannot be reduced to the man with the too-short trousers. His films – from the early burlesque of Jour de fête in 1949 to the highly stylised modernism of Play Time in 1967 – might not have an intellectual message, but they are delightful witnesses to the second half of the 20th century in France.Jacques Tatischeff – he later trimmed his surname, for simplicity – made his first film when he was nearly 40. He'd spent his early days skipping school, playing rugby and making friends laugh with improvised sketches during post-match drinks. Between 1930 and 1945 he took an act round the music halls of Europe and America and learnt that comedy was all about meticulous preparation. Yet this tall, impressive man with roots in the Russian aristocracy was not really made for comic acting, which was full of small guys like Chaplin and Keaton, who had scores to settle, hardened by impoverished childhoods and violent, alcoholic fathers. Born in 1907, Tati had grown up in a big family home full of servants, on the road to Versailles. He spent holidays in Deauville, and his parents had their own framing shop just off the chic Place Vendôme in central Paris. There they mixed with all the great artists of the day and assumed their son would take over the business.It was following a disastrous audition at the Finsbury Park Empire, after the war, that Tati decided to renounce the stage and pick up the camera. The switch was not unusual: music halls were dying out, film was attracting big crowds. Tati already had acting experience, too, with the pre-war shorts Oscar, champion de tennis and René Clément's little gem about a country boy turned boxing maestro, Soigne ton gauche. The latter, along with his own L'Ecole des facteurs (1947), are getting a rare outing at the French film festival and it's a pleasure to watch Tati brimming with energy and sketching out much of what he would later develop.Tati's first feature, Jour de fête (1949), was a rural ballad on a bicycle with Tati as the local postman François, marvellously enthusiastic but with a penchant to delay his deliveries for a quick drink and cheeky jive on the café dancefloor. But he is a proud man, and when a rumour circulates around the village about super-efficient mailmen in America, François tries his best to rise to the occasion. Burlesque and spirited, Jour de fête found a big public right away: the hard-up French audience were glad to forget their postwar problems, and it equally charmed the international public, keen to find a new quintessentially French director.Jour de fête contrasted one pace and way of life with another – faster, more productive, streamlined – and this opposition comes back in each Tati film. But it is not a reactionary shove at the evils of modernity. Such an ideological reading – Tati has been seen as both conservative and revolutionary, a critic of progress and a critic of American capitalism – is contradicted by the form of the films. Tati experimented and mastered the latest technologies. In Jour de fête he drew on silent burlesque but also exploited all the possibilities of post-synch sound, incorporating carefully selected noises – church bells, bicycle wheels, cockerel calls, buzzing bees – to draw the audience's attention. The film was the first in France to be shot in colour, though laboratories could not develop the negative until 1995.In 1953 Tati resisted calls for more postman antics and made Monsieur Hulot's Holiday instead, introducing the shy, complex, elegantly maladroit Hulot. The purposefully un-French man in trench coat and chic stripy socks peeping out beneath his trouser legs presented a very different comic character to the familiar Chaplin type, always the clever one, creator of jokes and inventor of solutions. Hulot's mishaps during his holiday at the seaside resort were solved, if at all, purely by chance as Tati tried to democratise and internationalise his comedy. To recompose reality he concentrated even more on selective sound as a replacement for dialogue. He also exhausted his cast and crew with his meticulous attention to detail. His work was never finished. The screening of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday at the festival is the third version Tati made of the film, including an extra scene involving a canoe looking like a shark's fin, which he shot 25 years later.Five years on, Tati brought Hulot back for My Uncle. It was made at a time when France was starting to buy into the American dream with gusto, importing motor cars, televisions and kitchen appliances. Speaking about the film later, Tati joked, "I didn't spark 1968, but . . .", alluding to the interpretations of the film as a critique of capitalism. Tati certainly punched holes in the system, but My Uncle was also a loving portrait of all the heady possibilities coming from the Atlantic. The film juxtaposes the world of Hulot's apartment in a traditional French village and the new city nearby, where his sister lives in a stylised home complete with fish-shaped fountains, super-cool kitchen, bean-shaped and long green sofas – the latter now sitting in New York's MoMA. A young Truffaut commented that My Uncle looked like no other film at the time, marvelling at Tati's expression of modernity conjured by a mastery of colour, camera angles, editing and sound.Tati now had the glory: My Uncle won an Oscar, he was shaking hands with De Gaulle at the Elyseé, snapped alongside Dean Martin and Sophia Loren in Hollywood and taking Edith Piaf's place for three months at Paris Olympia when she fell ill. But the public's fondness for Hulot also depressed Tati: he was comfortingly familiar. It reminded him of the reaction of music-hall crowds when a favourite song was announced: applause before the performance.So in 1967, with his fourth and last major film, Tati threw Hulot back into the crowd. Play Time has long been considered the black mark in his career, the one that brought it all crashing down and killed the laughter, left the director bankrupt, forced him to sell his home, lost him the rights to his films, and pushed him, by the late 70s, to make ads for slim-line yoghurts and Lloyd's Bank. And it could all have been different if he had accepted the requests to make Hulot on Holiday Again, Hulot Gets Married or – believe it or not – Hulot Meets the Martians. But Tati had moved on, and Play Time was a dizzyingly ambitious project. All the location scouting came to nothing, so Tati decided to build his own city. "Tativille" took just under three years to construct. It featured centrally heated four-storey buildings, roads, traffic lights, buses and cars circulating past a 25m Eiffel Tower. The production teams settled in a mini-suburb, with its own underground waterworks. To do it all justice, Tati filmed in 70mm and used six different sound recording systems.During the shoot he got the nickname "Tatillon" – pernickety – alluding to his attention to every detail and involvement in each area: Tati was the film's director, architect, electrician, designer and actor. He was again accused of being reactionary, but Tati told his critics to look at the film. "If I'd been against modern architecture I would have chosen the ugliest new buildings," he said, pointing out that his buildings were magnificent, "their lines are beautiful". Indeed, Tativille was never meant to be a dystopia; it was Tati's dream. What terrified him was how the dream might turn. He was not resisting the world as it changed, but had made a last, valiant attempt to humanise it in its process of transformation.When Play Time was released in 1967 it bombed. Crowds were quiet, everyone was looking for Hulot, and distributors chopped it down to under two hours. There was so much to see and hear, but the film came out at a time when audiences were getting accustomed to seeing not very much on small television screens. Tati was unable to recoup all the money he had invested, and his idea of turning Tativille into a film school foundered on a land dispute. He was forced to pull his mini-city down. On the day he stood alone at the edge of the site, waiting for the whole thing to fall, and as the rubble hit the ground he threw a copy of the script into the cloud of dust and ran away.Trafic, a fifth feature, and the television film Parade about music halls, followed in the 70s, but as Tati admitted, Play Time was really his last film. The world is not short of homages to his work. Some are depressing – Brad Pitt recently played Hulot in a Wes Anderson advert for Japanese telecoms – while others have some life, including Sylvain Chomet's forthcoming animation adaptation of The Illusionist, one of Tati's two unfilmed screenplays. One project that sadly never materialised was Federico Fellini's plan to direct a version of Don Quixote, with his friend in the lead role. In the end, Tati finished his career making adverts, but what does it matter? He never made Hulot Meets the Martians, preferring to keep his freedom. Hurling the script as Tativille crashed down was an act of defiance, not despair.The French Film Festival UK runs until 20 December, at venues around the country (frenchfilmfestival.org.uk/2009/tati/).Comedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
10 more books we loved reading in 2009 From witches to "Stitches," from Dorthea Lange to Elizabeth Taylor, there was plenty of good stuff to read. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Moynihan Letters to Be Published PublicAffairs said it will release a book culled from more than 10,000 pages of letters written by Mr. Moynihan, the former senator from New York, during his time on Capitol Hill and in the administrations of four presidents. feeds.nytimes.com |