by Liv Ullmann
"She is no more and no less than the way her face glows or doesn't glow." It would be easy to make fun of a book that is full of sentences like that. The "she" is Ullmann writing about herself in the third person, as she remembers a gloomy time in 1979 when she was in a floundering musical production of I Remember Mama on Broadway, troubled by a difficult teenage daughter and feeling the onset of middle age. The best parts of this autobiography, a sequel to her much better book, Changing, aren't so self-involved. They are Ullmann's descriptions of her tours in Cambodia and Ethiopia to witness—almost as a self-appointed international conscience—the devastation of wars, famine and natural disasters. Ullmann writes well enough to make these scenes come affectingly alive. Oh, and then there are pages of panting dialogue between Ullmann and the men who move in and out of her life. The main man in this book—a journalist she calls Abel—seems a singularly poor choice for her, which may be at least part of what her title is about. (Knopf, $14.95)
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