cover image My Life in Writing: Memoirs of a Maverick

My Life in Writing: Memoirs of a Maverick

J. C. Furnas. William Morrow & Company, $22.95 (396pp) ISBN 978-0-688-08842-2

Raised in Indianapolis in the days before cars, radio and TV, in a setting out of Booth Tarkington, ``Four Eyes'' Joe Furnas enjoyed a delightfully antediluvian childhood. Now 83, he writes his memoirs with characteristic humor and clarity. Readers will delight in his long career as a writer and world traveler. Working his way through Harvard with summer jobs and a stint as a tutor-nurse for a mentally disturbed student, Furnas went on to a theatrical press agency in New York, wrote lay medical articles, exposed evangelists, monkey-gland doctors, astrologers, unscrupulous optometrists and undertakers. Switching to books on social history, he achieved several awards, produced a major biography of Robert Louis Stevenson and one of the best books ever written about the South Seas, Anatomy of Paradise . This amiable autobiography is great fun. One of the nicest stories tells how Furnas regained his hearing after many years of deafness. (July)