Lost & Found
Reflections on Grief, Gratitude and Happiness
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Selected as one of The Oprah Daily's Best Books of 2022
'An extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. I wept at it, laughed with it, was entirely fascinated by it. I emerged feeling a little as if the world around me had been made anew.' - Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights
Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz's beloved father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery - from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.
Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz's father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer's daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage. But Schulz is also attentive to other, more universal kinds of conjunction: how private happiness can coexist with global catastrophe, how we get irritated with those we adore, how love and loss are themselves unavoidably inseparable. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering - a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.
A staff writer at the New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kathryn Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Crafted with the emotional clarity of C. S. Lewis and the intellectual force of Susan Sontag, Lost & Found is an uncommon book about common experiences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding," writes Pulitzer Prize winner Schulz (Being Wrong) in this stunning memoir. As Schulz recounts, she contended with the pain and ecstasy of both narratives colliding when she fell in love with her future wife, C., 18 months before Schulz's father died. She explores the grief of loss and joy of finding through penetrating reflections on the life of her father, a deep thinker with an endless appetite for the world; an "intimate study of beloved" wife; and philosophical forays into literature, poetry, and art. She ruminates on the "intrinsic pleasure of discovery" in quest narratives, is reminded how "the entire plan of the universe consists of losing" when C. reads her Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and thinks of her father's memorial service, one of the "greatest parties I ever attended," when remembering C. S. Lewis's quote that "we all have... many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst." By the end of these exquisite existential wanderings, Schulz comes to a quiet truce with her finding that "life, too, goes by contraries... by turns crushing and restorative... comic and uplifting." Schulz's canny observations are a treasure.
