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Loading... Love and other ways of dying : essays (edition 2015)by Michael Paterniti
Work InformationLove and Other Ways of Dying: Essays by Michael Paterniti
![]() No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() Anyway, after that God-awful essay, they really pick up. "The Accident" really snaps you out of the monotony that had been set up in the previous few. That one definitely takes some time to digest though. After I finished that one (around 1 am) I ended up sitting up for at least another hour thinking it over and playing it out in my head. I didn't pick up the book for another few days because I kept thinking about that essay. The rest were good, but I think "The Accident"hit me the most. To conclude, I'd recommend this, but not in its entirety. Skip ahead to "The Giant" and then again to "The Accident". After that, you can read the rest until the end, but there are a lot that are just a complete bore in the beginning. Oh also, to be fair, I would not consider this a book that can't be put down. It most definitely can, BUT you will not want to put it down mid-essay. Each holds you attention individually. ![]() ![]() For the rest of the review, visit my blog at: http://angelofmine1974.livejournal.com/101432.html no reviews | add a review
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"In this moving, lyrical, and ultimately uplifting collection of essays, Michael Paterniti turns a keen eye on the full range of human experience, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of everyday people. Michael Paterniti is one of the most original and empathic storytellers working today. His writing has been described as "humane, devastating, and beautiful" by Elizabeth Gilbert, "spellbinding" by Anthony Doerr, and "expansive and joyful" by George Saunders. In the seventeen wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge; in Dodge City, Kansas, he takes up residence at a roadside hotel and sees, firsthand, the ways in which the racial divide turns neighbor against neighbor. In each instance, Paterniti illuminates the full spectrum of human experience, introducing us to unforgettable everyday people and bygone legends, exploring the big ideas and emotions that move us. Paterniti reenacts François Mitterrand's last meal in a rustic dining room in France and drives across America with Albert Einstein's brain in the trunk of his rental car, floating in a Tupperware container. He delves with heartbreaking detail into the aftermath of a plane crash off the coast of Nova Scotia, an earthquake in Haiti, and a tsunami in Japan--and, in searing swirls of language, unearths the complicated, hidden truths these moments of extremity teach us about our ability to endure, and to love. Michael Paterniti has spent the past two decades grappling with some of our most powerful subjects and incomprehensible events, taking an unflinching point of view that seeks to edify as it resists easy answers. At every turn, his work attempts to make sense of both love and loss, and leaves us with a profound sense of what it means to be human. As he writes in the Introduction to this book, "The more we examine the grooves and scars of this life, the more free and complete we become." Praise for Michael Paterniti "A fearless, spellbinding collection of inquiries by a brilliant, globally minded essayist whose writing is magic and whose worldview brims with compassion. Genius chefs, an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall giant, an earthquake, a jet crash, and a president who eats songbirds--the size of Michael Paterniti's curiosity is matched only by the size of his heart."--Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See "Michael Paterniti is a genius."--Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things "Michael Paterniti is one of the best living practitioners of the art of literary journalism, able to fully elucidate and humanize the everyday and the epic. In his hands, every subject, every moment of personal or global upheaval, is treated with the same curiosity, respect, empathy, and clear-eyed wisdom."--Dave Eggers, author of The Circle "I have been waiting years for this collection. In each of these essays, Michael Paterniti unveils life for us, the beauty and heartbreak of it, as we would never see it ourselves but now can never forget it. Paterniti is brilliant--a rare master--and one of my favorite authors on earth."--Lily King, author of Euphoria"-- No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumMichael Paterniti's book Love and Other Ways of Dying was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.6Literature English (North America) American essays 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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It's a deft trick to pull off, this being part of, apart from, moved by yet not moving, the action and actors of daily life in many different places. Ukrainian farm life, Chinese urban life, US long-haul travel...all without leaving scars or enemies behind you. Quite a trick to sustain and more impressive to pull off as a career.
Obviously things are quite different in all the places and parts that Paterniti wrote about fifteen-plus years ago. In a certain sense I felt I was reading histories given the vantage point post-COVID and post-Russian invasion. When the collection of previously published work first appeared in 2015, reading these essays was less evocative of a distant and receding past. Revisiting the collection from today's greatly altered landscape made it feel disturbingly disconnected from our reality...in just seven years, the world of the late 1990s and early 2000s went from recent events to receding history!
The inflection points of recent times have been that powerful. I had not fully realized this until I read "The American Hero (in Four Acts)" from 1998 and thinking, "this is a different world entirely." While I found that a surprising reflection, it wasn't entirely unexpected. Essays are, by their nature, prone to the reader having the sense of them being artifacts of a moment in time. None of these essays are so personal as to make them timeless; nor are they about politics as practiced at the time they were written, or they would simply be irrelevant and/or uninteresting. Paterniti's essays touched, moved, and even amused me inside their own frame of reference. A high-satisfaction reading experience. (