The Atlantic Ocean
Essays on Britain and America
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
As he grew up, Andrew O'Hagan witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids. This collection of essays tells the story of that period in our cultural and political life. Through the reported essays that first made O'Hagan's name, it's a book filled both with personal story and the power of documentary witness. Opening with a major personal piece examining the journey of Britain and America since the closing of the Thatcher years, it concludes with a piece of reportage telling the story of a British and an American soldier who died in Iraq on the same day in 2006. A fascinating, important and timely collection from a hugely important essayist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning Scottish novelist O'Hagan (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe) brings together pieces previously published in Granta, the Guardian Weekend, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. A brilliant essayist, he constructs sentences that pierce like pinpricks. He recalls the emotional confessions elicited by his first published essay, from 1993, about the killing of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys; the original essay (included here) segues into a chilling confession of his own boyhood bullying: "Torture among our kind was fairly commonplace." After the July 7, 2005, London bus bombs he thinks, "In this seat, would it be a leg I'd lose, or an arm?" Sailing the ocean blue to write about Americans (such as Lee Harvey Oswald, William Styron, and James Baldwin), he dissects In Cold Blood and concludes: "It is clear now he invented whole sections.... None of it happened as Capote wished it had." Eye-tracking O'Hagan's observations on everything from Internet "mob tactics" and Marilyn Monroe ("Marilyn blew in like a snowdrift") to 9/11, one finds bright flashes of critical insights and trenchant thoughts embedded in dark synaptic cobwebs of anguish, grief, and memory.
