“I have done nothing memorable in my life,” declares Lance Morrow, “and yet all around me, things have happened.” Only the second part of that statement is true. Mr. Morrow, for many years an essayist at Time magazine, looks back on a long and eventful career in journalism in “The Noise of Typewriters,” a memoir that is less a sequential narrative than a series of impressions and vignettes, unabashedly digressive, invariably provocative. Now 83 and retired to a farm in upstate New York, Mr. Morrow is still an occasional essayist, for the Journal and other publications. His career began with a teenage stint as a reporter-photographer at the Danville News in Pennsylvania, where his experiences included witnessing a race car spin off its track and plow into spectators.

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