Other People
Takes & Mistakes
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation.
Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us a book that is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The book is divided into five sections: Men, Women, Athletes, Performers, Alter Egos. Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields's sustained, piercing focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible log jam of human information, and on the possibilities, and impossibilities, for human connection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This kitchen-sink compendium of Shield's work runs the gamut of subject matter and quality. The high points include sharply observed pieces that aren't quite conventional profiles, such as an appreciation of the actor Bill Murray and a portrait of the University of Washington women's basketball teammates who revived a star player after she went into cardiac arrest. There are plenty of low points, too, including short pieces of sexual memoir and musings on desire that read as solipsistic. His portrait of radio personality Delilah and her predominantly female audience is economical, evocative, and revealing. In this selection, Shields deftly shows rather than tells, forging a sense of connection to his subject. Many of the best pieces are about sports, including a meditation on Shields's love for sports movies and an exploration of baseball players whose patterns of thinking impaired their game. Failure typically plays a role in the best pieces, sometimes ruining personal interactions, sometimes inhibiting performance. Though there is a bit too much self-exploration, the persistent bite-size introspections help the reader better appreciate how well Shields can look at others.
