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You expect a certain image from one of America's favorite storytellers; expect that a man whose books have sold so many millions of copies would march in and act like a star. You imagine that the author of "Tales of the South Pacific," "Hawaii," "Alaska," and "Texas" would overwhelm with a carefully constructed personality.
But James Michener is all business. There is a sense about this quiet, bespectacled man that life is to be experienced with efficiency, that emotions are seldom to be seen or heard.
Even in his memoirs.
In an era when sordid confessions pour out of well-known figures like Cheerios from the box, the author of some three dozen books has at last chosen to turn his pen on himself. But the one real concession to passion in "The World Is My Home" is an admission to weaknesses for grand opera and peach ice cream.
Right in the first sentence of Chapter 1, Michener warns, "This will be a strange kind of autobiography"-and he eschews the traditional chronological structure. Rather, this examination of the people, places and events that have shaped his life is organized by subject with chapters titled "Travel," "People," "Politics," "Ideas," and, more playfully, "Intellectual Equipment."
At 84, he wrote the book only "because I have been asked to do this again and again." And yes, says Michener, as if the question were so obvious that it barely requires a response, "the fact that I delayed it so long would indicate that I was uncomfortable about writing it."
Says Owen Laster, Michener's literary agent for the 24 years, "I think there is a consistency in the memoir (and) the man in that he is a fairly private person in terms of his personal life." Readers seeking to learn more about Michener might better turn to "The Fires of Spring," his agent suggests. That coming-of-age novel spotlights "a young man who has had a hard time," says Laster, something Michener has chosen not to dwell upon in his life story.
Michener began his life as a foundling and was raised by a woman who took in laundry to...