What to like about Today's Ike.

• Author: COOPER, MATTHEW
• Position: Review

Most memoirs burn bridges and settle scores. Colin Powell's is clearly not a finale, however, but a prologue

My American Journey Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, Random House, $25.95

Colin Powell's memoirs have become a publishing phenomenon, one of those rare events in which the usually obscure agreements surrounding a book contract have become the stuff of common knowledge. The $6 million advance, the book tour, the carefully considered interview with Barbara Walters--all are familiar by now. And as the hour of Powell's presidential decision approaches, the interest in the man and his career only grows.

What's less well-known is the book itself or at least parts of it. The rags-to-riches story has received plenty of attention: that Powell spoke Yiddish as a child, that he hails from Jamaican stock, and that he hung out with a multiracial gang in his old Bronx neighborhood. But other important strains in the book have been largely passed over.

For one thing, My American Journey has a lighter touch than these sorts of books tend to have. Most memoirs, literary or political, are aimed, in large measure, at obituary writers; they are a last, bald attempt to shape one's epitaph. And so they wind up puffing up one's role in controversial events. After Donald Regan resigned as White House chief of staff, for instance, he tapped out one of the great, score-settling memoirs--its revelations about Nancy Reagan's astrologer being the most memorable jab---in a book designed to exonerate Regan from Iran-Contra and other missteps of Reagan's second term. Other memoirs are written by the intellectually insecure and are designed to shore up one's position as a great thinker. The Kissinger memoirs and Nixon's many books exemplify this genre at its apex. For Powell, the memoir is a different sort of tool. Powell obviously sees his best days ahead of him, not behind. This is about promise, not retribution. His reflections, then, are less infused by the self-pity or pomposity that are the hallmark of memoirs meant to be a capstone. (Alas, they're short, too, on the kind of bridge-burning that can make memoirs so much fun.) Instead, My American Journey is accented with a breezy, self-deprecating sense of humor. One night finds Powell pounding an array of shots--from Creme de Menthe to gin--with his buddies well past midnight, only to be awakened early the next morning for a drill simulating a Soviet nuclear attack. Powell also tells a hilarious story...