We need to remember that this is often how history happens. Background music does not swell at the crucial moment, and trumpets do not sound, when the events of history are actually taking place. The orator or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact warranted, whether time will judge him harshly. Few great men have felt this burden more completely than Lincoln.

That’s really the problem with the book. The one thing a movie star memoir has to be is fun—it doesn’t have to be true (few of them are that), or fair to ex-wives or husbands or old lovers (few of them are that either), but it does need to be fun, to lift us out of the humdrum problems of our own life for a few hours, and, alas, American Prince is no fun at all.

– Michael Korda on Tony Curtis’ autobiography, American Prince, on The Daily Beast.

“Up, John. John.“
“Yes?”
“Up.”

In HBO’s award-winning John Adams mini-series, Abigail Adams speaks these words of encouragement to her husband in his moment of despair upon winning the presidency, when he’s collapsed into a chair as he questions his own life and accomplishments and realizes all the unpalatable public duties and responsibilities that office demands. Her prodding and encouragement were a constant throughout John Adams’ life and presidency during which–under seige from his is former close friend and vice president, Thomas Jefferson, turned into a political foe, and the other members of his cabinet were themselves taking advice and directions from an off-stage Alexander Hamilton–she was his closest confidante and most trusted advisor.

The mini-series is absolutely fantastic in its depiction of this perfect collaboration between wife and husband, as Abigail is the perfect partner that offers words or kicks of encouragement, criticism, and tender support whenever necessary, acts as John’s foil for political debate, and provides input into John’s speeches and political ideas. The mini-series, and perhaps the book upon which is based, really ought to have been renamed Abigail and John or some variation to reflect just how much of an influence and equal partner she was throughout his life. She’s the very anti-thesis of the modern political wife whose main task seems to be to look pretty and smile widely while standing in the background.

It gives the rise-and-demise of Edwin Alonzo Boyd and his gang of bank robbers, who became Canada’s most notorious criminals (and media darlings) in the early 1950s.

Our choices in books, music, art, and design go to the core of who we are. “Taste can offer us a doorway into people’s lives,” says Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. “Taste reveals a lot about what someone values and needs to fill their life with meaning.”

[...]

But we also make choices about art based on a desire to carve out identities for ourselves–to articulate the stories of our lives. By the same token, we look for those stories in others. We also feel intiutively that we can judge others by their tastes.

[...]

In a sense, [Giovanni] Escalera was using his taste-hunting abilities to forge an identity. This is the inmost layer of taste formation–using our artistic choices to articulate the story of our lives for ourselves and others. Identity comprises not just the traits that describe us, but also stories about how we became that way, and how we present ourselves to others, explains Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Tastes are among the primary ingredients in these personal stories. “Tastes come up in people’s narratives as a way of signalling who they are,” says McAdams.

These were no ordinary forgeries: Israel may have been a criminal, but she was a genius, too. And very dedicated to her work. Her approach was something akin to method acting; She would become the person whose life she was stealing, effectively writing new, but entirely plausible, chapters to personal histories. This she did by immersing herself in the smallest details of a life, reading diligently the biographies of her subjects, but also channelling their psyches while reading or viewing or imagining the inner personas of the likes of [Noel] Coward and [Dorothy] Parker.

Did Israel achieve a level of certainty and authority over her-”self” in her adopted lives that most of us never quite achieve in our real lives? Goldstein continues:

That the real thing is so hard to produce — authenticity and originality are such rare commodities — makes what Lee Israel did all the more impressive. She extended reality in a believable way. Like a well-schooled actor, she was herself and someone else at the same time. The results of her carefully controlled multiple personalities might very well be a greater achievement than the often banal bits of art society life — recountings of dinner parties and the like– she imitated.