Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History

by Henry F. May

Coming To Terms: A Study In Memory And History, by May, Henry F. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520059697
• ISBN13: 9780520059696
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A well-written memoir

In Coming to Terms, the intellectual and religious historian Henry F. May (b. 1915) blends a memoir of his formative years with biographies of his parents and their ancestors. The attractiveness of this work is not so much May himself--an academic of solid second rank--but rather the author's careful, limpid writing. Consider, for instance, the following observation about cross-country train trips during his graduate school years: "For all the people on the train, I felt a warm, facile Whitmanian affection. People shifted around in the coach, forming congenial groups, sometimes passing a bottle....Among my choicer companions I remember...a very friendly man just out of San Quentin for robbery. He lent old ladies his pillows, and everybody liked him. In the middle of the night he got off at some small stop, accompanied by a pretty girl he had just met. The next morning the police came through the car looking for somebody's missing wallet." (217-18) There is material of historical interest here as well; but because May is telling lives rather than history per se, few would know to look in this book for information about say, early Denver, federal oil reserves, household servants in turn-of-the-century California, or Japanese language training during World War II. Although the consistently addlepated notions of faculty and student leaders at Berkeley and Harvard during the 1930s and `40s deserve some well-aimed smacks, this is not a book of serious historical reassessment but a book to be enjoyed for itself and its enviable literary style.