Autobiography – Page 21 – education and deconstruction.com

Confessions of A Prairie Bitch

The Book of the Week is “Confessions of A Prairie Bitch” by Alison Arngrim, published in 2010. This is the autobiography of the actress who played Nellie Oleson on the hit American TV show, “Little House on the Prairie” which aired from 1974 to 1983.

On the show which was set in a small town in the late 1800’s, Arngrim played the role of the spoiled, rich teenage daughter of the owners of a general store. She frequently got into fights with a goody-goody girl from another family in the neighborhood. Arngrim was twelve years old when she started the show. Prior to that, her show-business parents had afforded her the chance to play some small parts in TV commercials and movies. Starting when she was six, she was subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of her much older brother.

Read the book to learn how Arngrim was able to deal with the trauma from her early childhood in positive ways later in life through her acting career and social and political activism.

Secret Life: An Autobiography

The Book of the Week is “Secret Life: An Autobiography” by Michael Ryan, published in 1996. This book tells the story of how Ryan became a sex addict as an adult. The root cause of his problem began when he was about five years old. He had an otherwise relatively normal boyhood in 1950’s and 1960’s America, but for his alcoholic father. Read the book to learn the details of the situation that could happen to any child whose parents are too trusting.

Backing Into Forward

The Book of the Week is “Backing Into Forward” by Jules Feiffer, published in 2010. Feiffer ran with a creative crowd who lived through the historically tumultuous 20th Century years of poverty, anti-Fascist and anti-Communist hysteria and wars.

As a kid, Feiffer had a passion for comic strips. He did an easy stint in the military and kicked off his career in the 1940’s working as an unpaid intern of sorts, at Will Eisner’s illustration studio. He later graduated to submitting cartoons to the radical newspaper, The Village Voice, which, when founded in the 1950’s, did not pay its contributors. After two years of boosting readership, he finally started to get paid.

After achieving fame, Feiffer also delivered college lectures, although he himself never attended college. Nevertheless, he had political smarts, and told the students that policies in Washington were made by an old boy network that would never admit wrongdoing in crises that were handled poorly. And there were many crises in the 1960’s and 1970’s. To add insult to injury, the shameless perpetrators would simply switch government positions, except for a few who resigned to escape further embarrassment at getting caught.

Read the book to learn of Feiffer’s family life, and adult adventures creating comics and writing plays and children’s books.

My Paper Chase

The Book of the Week is “My Paper Chase, The Stories of Vanished Times” by Harold Evans, published in 2009. This is a recounting of Evans’ life and career in one volume.

Evans’ desire for obtaining a university degree was unusual for British journalists of his generation because it was not necessary. Fortunately, he was able to complete his degree in three years without having to study Latin.

Over the course of his decades-long rise through newspaper management, he covered wars, disasters, scandals, and also authorized the publishing of a number of controversial stories that defied British law. He believes that the job of a newspaper is to inform citizens of goings-on that affect them, even if the government does not want them to know.

Evans writes, “Violence is always sure of space on television and in the press. Political change, being more subtle and dull, is frequently neglected until it explodes into ‘inexplicable’ violence.”

One More Time

The Book of the Week is “One More Time” by Carol Burnett, published in 1986. This is an emotionally rich, memorable autobiography. Its author had a tough childhood, as the older daughter of two alcoholic parents. Raised by her grandmother on welfare in Texas, she enjoyed a few happy times nevertheless.

Burnett experienced excellent luck on days when it was pouring rain. For example, on a rainy day, a benefactor appeared in her life to allow her to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. He provided her with two years’ worth of funding in which to succeed. She met the deadline.

Read the book to learn how her life experiences provided tons of material for her comedic TV show.

Audition

The Book of the Week is “Audition” by Barbara Walters, published in 2008. This is Walters’ autobiography, a detailed account of her personal and professional life. She had a long, illustrious career in TV News. She started out as a behind-the-scenes writer for the “Today Show” on NBC in the early 1960’s, when there was still a lot of discrimination against women. Nevertheless, her hard work at, talent and suitability for her job, over the course of decades, afforded her the opportunity to interview countless famous people; some, multiple times.

There were occasions when Walters received special treatment by her interviewees. In the spring of 1977, she was personally driven for six hours around the Bay of Pigs vicinity by none other than Fidel Castro. Later that year, she witnessed multiple Middle Eastern politicians gather all in one place when Egypt’s Anwar Sadat made (momentary) peace with Israel’s Menachim Begin. ABC interrupted a college football game with the “breaking news.” Viewers telephoned the network to express their displeasure, and after seven minutes of complaining, the viewers got their game back.

Walters was lucky to have helped pioneer the art of the TV interview and enjoyed its best years. She asked hard-hitting, sometimes personal questions that hosts do not ask anymore. She writes that nowadays, TV ratings rise with guests who are attention whores or criminals– whose stories are tabloid articles. Political leaders or celebrities with substance have become a rarity. “We really seem to care only if they are outrageous and call our president a devil or declare that the Holocaust never existed. Stand up and scream and we will interview you, or be reasonable and unheard.” Fortunately, the internet has become a source of intelligent discussion in some quarters– a source that is not under pressure to generate ratings.

Here Comes Trouble

The Book of the Week is “Here Comes Trouble” by Michael Moore, published in 2011. This is a collection of stories from the life of a passionate political activist. The author has used various ways to inform the public of injustices, including running a newspaper, producing a TV show and movies, and writing books and articles.

At the end of Moore’s freshman year at a Catholic seminary, he was asked not to return. It was an academically challenging environment, but he was a good student. He committed no serious infractions.

However, Moore was a frequent questioner of authority, as he had been from a very young age. He grew up in a generation of Americans whose early childhood was still innocent, having been born in the mid-1950’s. He asked his religious instructors pointed questions such as “Why don’t we let women be priests?” and “Do you think Jesus would send soldiers to Vietnam if he were here right now?” and “In the Bible, there’s no mention of Jesus from age twelve to age thirty. Where do you think he went?”

Moore had changed his mind about becoming a priest, anyway. Read the book to find out about some of the more entertaining episodes in his life, religious and otherwise.

Long Walk to Freedom

The Book of the Week is “Long Walk to Freedom” by Nelson Mandela, published in 1994. This is Mandela’s autobiography.

The author’s father died when he was nine. The author was destined for a dreadful life of poverty under South African apartheid, were it not for a lucky break. His mother had a connection to a wealthy, powerful Xhosa chief, who raised him along with his son. They acquired a quality, British-style education.

Although he was a poor student, Mandela earned an undergraduate degree and eventually, after many years, a law degree. An attorney with whom he worked, advised him against entering politics, as this would cause him to “get in trouble with the authorities, lose all his clients, go bankrupt, break up his family and end up in jail.” Unfortunately, most of the above came to pass.

The South African government employed “divide and conquer” tactics to prevent the Whites, Africans, Indians and Coloureds from uniting and overthrowing White rule. However, there were indications that it cared about world opinion during the decades Mandela was in prison (the 1960’s into the 1990’s). The government could have summarily executed Mandela and his fellow African National Congress party members (as well as committed genocide against all dark-skinned ethnic groups), but it did not.

Instead, it held Stalinesque show trials to inevitably determine that politically active protest groups were dangerous subversives who had to be locked up. It oppressed all non-whites by restricting many aspects of their lives, including voting, employment, place of residence, local travel, curfew hours; even medical care. Mandela’s boyhood was completely absent of physicians. Black ones did not exist in his generation, and going to see a white one was unheard of.

In 1962, Mandela, was living “underground” during a respite from prison. With the help of friends, he found a way to travel internationally to attend political conferences. He recounted that, “…as I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane? But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts.”

Mandela experienced conflicting feelings about his Xhosa-tribe origins and English upbringing. “I confess to being something of an Anglophile. When I thought of Western democracy and freedom, I thought of the British parliamentary system. Despite Britain being the home of parliamentary democracy, it was that democracy that had helped to inflict a pernicious system of iniquity on my people. While I abhorred the notion of British imperialism, I never rejected the trappings of British style and manners.”

Too Fat to Fish

The Book of the Week is “Too Fat to Fish” by Artie Lange, published in 2009. This is Lange’s autobiography. He discusses his father’s untimely death, his mother’s saintliness, bouts of cocaine addiction, being a dockworker, career as a television and radio comedian, and the title of his book, among other topics.

He claims his mother, who embodies the idiosyncratic stereotype of an “Italian mama,” was cleaning the house at the crack of dawn on a Saturday, when his friend called regarding a fishing trip that day. His mother got on the phone and aggressively gave the friend an earful about how Lange, who was 23 at the time, was “too fat to fish” and would fall off the boat and drown. She thus would not let him go. Having a bad hangover, he was secretly glad that her concern for him, even if a bit overprotective, gave him an excuse to go back to sleep.

Catch Me If You Can

The Book of the Week is “Catch Me If You Can” by Frank Abagnale, published in 2000. This is the memoir of a guy who enjoyed the challenge of committing white collar crime.

He executed his first exploit as a teenager, using his father’s credit card to gain an extra gift from a promotion at various gas stations. Later, he described how much trouble he went through just to forge checks. He had a tremendous ability to outsmart the authorities, but eventually he was caught, and thrown into isolation in a French prison. Needless to say, this was not exactly a fun experience for him. French justice was not kind to him. He described the extremely harsh physical and psychological conditions. Read the book to learn how his prison time and other experiences caused him to take a new life direction.