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Top of the pile
84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
73/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Jon Mooallem
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
May 17, 2022
Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusionâa 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 21 years in prison, and moreâall with a deep conviction that it's our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us.
What The Reviewers Say
A transporting series of deep dives into surprising characters and situations.
Mooallem brings together the best of his journalistic essays to create an intellectually moving collection. Together, the survival stories and treatises on environmental and social traumas offer a meditation on how various systems...cause and exacerbate problems with sometimes devastating and irreversible results.
[A] rich collection of essays.
A master essayist ranges far and wide with aplomb.
