A Memoir at Age 99

My mother is an extraordinary human being. At age 99, she is still an active and alert woman, full of interest about the upcoming presidential election, an inveterate watcher of TV news and Rachel Maddow and The Ed Show, an avid reader of The New York Times and best-sellers.

But her latest accomplishment is her own considerable triumph -- a memoir entitled I Remember just published by TidePool Press, a firm which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also lives. It is an elegiac look at her life over the past century, which is now receding from our memories. She ranges over her childhood as the daughter of a Harvard Professor at the Medical School in the 1920s to her sojourns as a painter in China and Central America in the 1930s to the remarkable years of the Kennedy Administration in the 1960s when her husband (and my father) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. served as a White House Special Assistant, to her return to her home in Massachusetts, where she has since led a plucky life of involvement.

Born into a family of high-spirited women, she was a feminist before that word became fashionable. Her book tells the story of how good fortune and her own activism thrust her into the events and into the lives of people that have shaped our times. The book can be purchased through TidePool Press at tidepoolpress.com. It is entitled I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People by Marian Cannon Schlesinger.