Only Love Can Break Your Heart
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, David Samuels writes with a reportorial acumen and stylistic flair that recall the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Combining elegant, nuanced personal essays with far-out reporting—on the lives of radicals in the Pacific Northwest, anti-abortion zealots, demolition experts, suburban hip-hop stars, and more—Samuels shows us an American landscape whose unsettling mix of profound dislocations and blue-sky optimism is both instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.
These essays display his unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances that bubble up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of salesman, dreamers, aging baseball legends, crackpots, atomic test site workers, and dog track bettors who struggle to live out their dreams one day at a time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of previously published stories by Harper's contributing editor Samuels, he claims "writing for magazines is like playing sports." Whatever the journalistic game Samuels's subjects range from Woodstock 1999 to a Goodyear blimp pilot, among others, plus a few personal essays Samuels is a solid player who sometimes hits home runs. "Every building begins as a dream," he states in "Bringing Down the House," a profile of a demolition company, but "estroying a building... a slow, almost biblical reckoning." Behind the scenes at such places as the Sedan Crater nuclear test site; the antiglobalization Mecca of Eugene, Ore.; and Super Bowl XL with Stevie Wonder, Samuels's reportage is at its best. He wryly flays false constructions of American reality on the right, left and places in between. "Ideologically, what Chad Sweet has in common with his newfound friends in the Republican Party is that nothing he says makes any sense," Samuels writes about a new Republican at a $2,000-a-plate Bush-Cheney '04 fund-raising party. Samuels could give a little Bush-bashing wink here; instead he observes that "politics isn't about coherence anymore." Neither is much of life in our "Golden Land of Mini-Moos," according to Samuels, who captures this "free floating weirdness" with clarity.
