SOURCE: "Sing along with Michener," in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 12, 1992, p. 4.

[In the following review, Barich praises Michener's memoir, The World Is My Home, as a "Horatio Alger story," both entertaining and touching.]

In his new memoir, The World Is My Home, James Michener puts to rest the idea that there are no second acts in American lives. As the old saying goes, his life really began at 40, when, during World War II, he sat down in a Quonset hut on Espiritu Santo Island, lit a smoky lantern, and turned out the linked stories that became Tales of the South Pacific, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. This stroke of luck helped to transform him into James Michener, the best-selling phenomenon, and he has continued to live on the grand scale ever since, becoming in the process America's "best-loved" writer.

Michener's reminiscences don't have...