Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Writing for Harper's and the New Yorker over the last decade, David Samuels has penned a disillusioned love song to the often amusing and sometimes fatal American habit of self-delusion, reporting from a landscape peopled by salesmen, dreamers, radical environmentalists, suburban hip-hop stars, demolition experts, aging baseball legends, billionaire crackpots, and dog track bettors whose heartbreaking failures and occasional successes are illuminated by flashes of anger and humor.

Including profiles of Pacific Northwest radicals and Nevada nuclear test site workers alongside coverage of Pentagon press conferences and the Super Bowl in Detroit, Only Love Can Break Your Heart proves Samuels to be a wonderful inheritor of the great journalistic tradition established by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion in the 1960s. This first collection of his painstakingly reported and wildly inventive writing reveals the full spectrum of his talents, as well as an unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances bubbling up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of ordinary citizens who struggle to live out their dreams.


1101303258
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Writing for Harper's and the New Yorker over the last decade, David Samuels has penned a disillusioned love song to the often amusing and sometimes fatal American habit of self-delusion, reporting from a landscape peopled by salesmen, dreamers, radical environmentalists, suburban hip-hop stars, demolition experts, aging baseball legends, billionaire crackpots, and dog track bettors whose heartbreaking failures and occasional successes are illuminated by flashes of anger and humor.

Including profiles of Pacific Northwest radicals and Nevada nuclear test site workers alongside coverage of Pentagon press conferences and the Super Bowl in Detroit, Only Love Can Break Your Heart proves Samuels to be a wonderful inheritor of the great journalistic tradition established by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion in the 1960s. This first collection of his painstakingly reported and wildly inventive writing reveals the full spectrum of his talents, as well as an unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances bubbling up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of ordinary citizens who struggle to live out their dreams.


26.95 Out Of Stock
Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by David Samuels
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Add to Wishlist
Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by David Samuels

Overview

Writing for Harper's and the New Yorker over the last decade, David Samuels has penned a disillusioned love song to the often amusing and sometimes fatal American habit of self-delusion, reporting from a landscape peopled by salesmen, dreamers, radical environmentalists, suburban hip-hop stars, demolition experts, aging baseball legends, billionaire crackpots, and dog track bettors whose heartbreaking failures and occasional successes are illuminated by flashes of anger and humor.

Including profiles of Pacific Northwest radicals and Nevada nuclear test site workers alongside coverage of Pentagon press conferences and the Super Bowl in Detroit, Only Love Can Break Your Heart proves Samuels to be a wonderful inheritor of the great journalistic tradition established by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion in the 1960s. This first collection of his painstakingly reported and wildly inventive writing reveals the full spectrum of his talents, as well as an unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances bubbling up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of ordinary citizens who struggle to live out their dreams.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781595581877
Publisher: New Press, The
Publication date: 04/01/2008
Pages: 372
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Table of Contents

The Golden Land of Mini-Moos (a Preface)     xv
I
Woodstock 1999     3
Notes from Underground     31
The Spaceman Falls to Earth     56
The Making of a Fugitive     68
In the Age of Radical Selfishness     89
Rehab is for Quitters     103
400,000 Salesmen Can't be Wrong!     119
A Prince Among Thieves     142
Bringing Down the House     150
II
On Message     183
Buried Suns     206
Being Paul McCartney     240
Sleeping on Roads     244
Life is Full of Important Choices     248
Marginal Notes     259
The Light Stuff     269
A Fistful of Peanuts     295
The Blind Man and the Elephant     314
Only Love Can Break Your Heart     345
Source Notes     371
From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

Literature
Essays
American Essays
Literature
Essays
American Essays

Customer Reviews