Life Happens
And Other Unavoidable Truths
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From the 2005 Pulitzer Prize—winning columnist Connie Schultz comes fresh, clever, insightful commentary on life today: love, politics, social issues, family, and much, much more. In the tradition of Anna Quindlen, Molly Ivins, and Erma Bombeck, but with a distinctive voice and sensibility all her own, Connie Schultz comes out of the heartland of America to get you seeing, feeling, and thinking more deeply about the lives we lead today.
“You might spot someone you know in the stories here,” writes Connie. “Maybe you’ll even find a glimpse of yourself. Yes, each of us is unique, but life happens in ways that bind us like Gorilla Glue.” In Life Happens, Connie shares sharp, passionate observations, winning our hearts with personal thoughts on a wide range of topics, from finding love in middle age to the meaning behind her father’s lunch pail, from single motherhood, to who really gets the tips you leave and why as the war in Iraq, race relations, gay marriage, and wwhy women
don’t vote. In a more humorous vein, Connie shares her mother’s advice on men (“Don’t marry him until you see how he treats the waitress”) and warns men everywhere against using the dreaded f-word (it’s not the one you think). Along the way, Connie introduces us to the heroic people who populate our world and shows us how just one person can make a difference.
Charming, provocative, funny, and perceptive, Life Happens gives us, for the first time, Connie Schultz’s celebrated commentary in one irresistible volume. Life Happens challenges us to be more open and alive to others and to the world around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize-winning Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Schultz has been compared to Anna Quindlen and Molly Ivins, but as this collection of dozens of her columns shows, she's not a pale imitator; her focus is local (her family, her marriage, her state), but her observations resound across the country. Organized topically, the book's sections include "Love in the Middle Ages," about her marriage to Ohio congressman Sherrod Brown; "Family Values," with tales about her loving but complex family and background; and "Keeping the Faith," a selection of liberal religious columns best summed up by one of the columns' headlines: "It's Not Christian to Champion Hate." The most powerful work is culled from Schultz's columns on the war in Iraq and its effects as felt in Ohio. Attending a mass for a fallen Marine, Schultz writes, "We stand near the lifeless remains of our beloved, so grief-stricken we can barely breathe when, suddenly, we look up and behold the face of someone we can't quite believe took the time to find us in our darkest hour." Schultz's humor and eloquence, along with her anger with-and affection for-contemporary America, make this collection an intelligent and affecting read.
