Serious Face
Essays
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the discovery of the author’s face in a century-old photograph to a triple-amputee hospice director working at the border of life and death, here are thirteen hopeful, heartbreaking, and profound essays from “one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors working today” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews
Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from California’s deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and more—all with a deep conviction that it’s our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us.
Mooallem’s powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing “as much art as it is journalism,” and Jia Tolentino has praised his “grace and command.” In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times Magazine writer Mooallem (This Is Chance!) "whip through our colossal, mystifying, stupidly beautiful world" in this rich collection of essays. "A House at the End of the World" profiles B.J. Miller, the executive director of a Zen Hospice in California who pioneered the notion that death is a "human experience instead of primarily a medical one," and "This Story About Charlie Kaufman Has Changed" offers a portrait of the elusive auteur Kaufman, filled with Mooallem's first drafts that received "discouraging feedback." A number of the essays deal with clashes between humans and nature: in "We Have Fire Everywhere," a show-stopping piece about the Paradise, Calif., wildfire, the heat—and trapped motorists' terror—are brought to vivid life, as is a sense that "something was different now. Fire was winning, finding ways to overpower our fight response." And "Why These Instead of Others," the harrowing story of two friends' Alaskan kayaking trip that goes awry, turns into a portrait of human resilience and helplessness. Mooallem has a real knack for evoking places, people, and emotions, and the individuals he writes about put a human face on larger issues such as climate change and conservation. This is well worth the price of admission.
