Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by David Samuels

Overview

In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, David Samuels writes with a reportorial acumen and stylistic flair that recall the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Combining elegant, nuanced personal essays with far–out reporting—on the lives of radicals in the Pacific Northwest, anti–abortion zealots, demolition experts, suburban hip–hop stars, and more—Samuels shows us an American landscape whose unsettling mix of profound dislocations and blue–sky optimism is both instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.

These essays display his unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances that bubble up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of salesman, dreamers, aging baseball legends, crackpots, atomic test site workers, and dog track bettors who struggle to live out their dreams one day at a time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582435039
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	05/26/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

David Samuels, a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, is the author of Only Love Can Break Your Heart and The Runner. He is the literary editor of Tablet Magazine.

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

Editorial Reviews

"An intelligence and unsparing lucidity reminiscent of Joan Didion's work circa Slouching Towards Bethlehem." —New York Observer

"He's a savant when it comes to scene reporting and has a nearly autistic command of minor details and facts. Armed with minutiae, he achieves the glorious breadth and details of a mural painter." —Village Voice

"The protraits that emerge are exhaustive and often severe, but there is something delicate in Samuel's method. In his stories the random flow of events takes on real meaning, allowing us to see what's hidden in plain view and to hear what's being said." —The New York Times Book Review

"Samuels is heir to an American tradition, and writing this terrific needs a place to go." —Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

The source of both tragedy and humor here is the wide gap between the dreams that draw these men onward and the trail of disaster they leave behind…The portraits that emerge are exhaustive and often severe, but there is something delicate in Samuels's method. In his stories the random flow of events takes on real meaning, allowing us to see what's hidden in plain view and to hear what isn't being said. He has some of Joan Didion's gift for stripping the layers away until a fraud is exposed.
—The New York Times

Jascha Hoffman

A mixed bag of magazine pieces by a seemingly reluctant pop-culture scribe. Even as he laments the difficulties of the job and hints at moving on to some other line of work, freelancer Samuels admits to knowing no other kind of life than being a magazine writer-"Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, but sooner or later, you may experience a few moments of perfection in the middle of the scrum." This collection contains a few such moments of grace. One is when a grumpy old bandleader confesses to having whispered to TV host Paul Anka, "a real bastard" in his heydey, regarding the Ed Sullivan-era Beatles: "They'll never make it." Plagued by arthritis but not ashamed of his mistaken prognosis, the bandleader continues to play 40-odd years later. Another is a profile of hippie entrepreneur Michael Lang, the author of several editions of the Woodstock festival, "even-tempered in his K-Swiss sneakers and Banana Republic bush jacket." Still another is an interview with a Motown session player whose contributions to the careers of the Rolling Stones, Smokey Robinson and other greats have, said player insists, not been properly appreciated. But Samuels's collection also contains too many pieces that are one yellowing page too ephemeral or relentlessly shallow, in the way of so much magazine journalism. A passing argument over whether Nick Drake appears, much posthumously, in a Volvo or a Volkswagen ad might work in a sitcom; on the page, or at least in these pages, it doesn't. It goes far beyond cliche to assert, clumsily, that "Lennon and McCartney were two different but equal types of man," and it was old news even at the time that both John Hinckley Jr. and Mark David Chapman, would-beand actual assassin respectively, carried copies of The Catcher in the Rye. So-so and without much oomph.

Kirkus Reviews