Life Sketches
-
- $23.99
-
- $23.99
Publisher Description
This collection—harvest of a lifetime of brilliant reportage and reflection—brings together the most memorable biographical pieces John Hersey has written over the past fifty years. His subjects range from Sinclair Lewis, for whom the twenty-three-year-old Hersey was secretary, and the young John F. Kennedy as he related to Hersey the dramatic story of PT 109, to Private John Daniel Ramey and his efforts to overcome illiteracy with the help of the U.S. Army, and Jessica Kelley, an elderly widow trapped in a buckling tenement as the 1955 Connecticut floods raged outside.
Whether describing a brisk morning stroll with President Truman or hours spent fishing for blues with Lillian Hellman, recounting Benjamin Weintraub’s harrowing escape from a Nazi death camp or Varsell Pleas’s dangerous struggle for voting rights in the Mississippi of 1964, Hersey brings us face to face with some of the extraordinary events and people of the past half century. And it is with his profoundly curious and sympathetic mind and unsurpassed journalistic eloquence that he brings each startlingly to life.
“The skill that won Hersey a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 is more than evident . . . an important collection of lives and their lessons.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Any reader not already a fan of Hersey’s will be swayed by the richness of this collection. Hersey’s legion of admirers will merely be gratified and moved again and again. . . The cumulative force of these essays is amazing.” –Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For over 40 years Hersey has been contributing profiles and character sketches to a variety of magazines, and this is a selection of what his publisher finds the best of them. They vary considerably in interest, read, as they must be, many years after their initial urgency. On writers, his reminiscence of Sinclair Lewis, for instance, is much more compelling than his rather slavish tribute to Lillian Hellman. On presidents, his noncommittal account of JFK and his PT-109 experience is more revealing than his over-detailed and too-cozy depiction of one of Harry Truman's early morning walks. Perhaps disappointingly to his publisher, his review of Alfred Knopf's fascination with our national parks is probably the least absorbing piece in the book. Hersey is best at unknowns: Jessica Kelley, the tiny, brave widow who survived (barely) the 1955 Connecticut flood, or Private John Daniel Ramey, who learned to read and write in the Army in World War II. And there is a splendid account of a persistent black man trying to win the vote in Mississippi in the early '60s. Hersey always writes clearly and un pretentiously, and the best of these pieces are very superior journalism indeed. BOMC selection.
