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4+ Works 1,703 Membros 111 Críticas

About the Author

Michael Paterniti won the 1998 National Magazine Award for his article "Driving Mr. Albert," which was first published in "Harper's Magazine". A former Executive Editor of "Outside", his work has appeared in "Rolling Stone", "The New York Times Magazine", "Details", & "Esquire" where he is mostrar mais Writer-at-Large. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife & son. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos

Obras por Michael Paterniti

Associated Works

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004 (2004) — Contribuidor — 740 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 (2011) — Contribuidor — 237 exemplares
The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (2006) — Contribuidor — 205 exemplares
The Best American Magazine Writing 2003 (2003) — Contribuidor — 70 exemplares
The Best American Magazine Writing 2011 (2011) — Contribuidor — 36 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Críticas

I read the first five chapters of this last night and have decided to stop. Not only is it not very interesting or engaging, it's also really crude. I mean, there are plenty of people alive now who remember Einstein---he has several living relatives. Just because he was famous doesn't mean we all have a right to him---or that anyone does---and to be so flippant about the illegal desecration of his body is beyond quirky. It's just plain poor taste. These guys should have been arrested. I find nothing redeeming about what I've read. I do not recommend. Ew.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
classyhomemaker | 33 outras críticas | Dec 11, 2023 |
An odd little story about an odd piece of history.
 
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JudyGibson | 33 outras críticas | Jan 26, 2023 |
Esta crítica foi escrita no âmbito dos Primeiros Críticos do LibraryThing.
You expect essays to be inward-gazing, thought-provoking exercises in the acquisition of knowledge. What that often entails is also a certain claustrophobia, a kind of psychic noli me tangere above-it-all-ness. Author Paterniti avoids this fatally separate sense of insulation with the evergreen tactic of humor...but also of, in most of his essays, compassion. He tells us his stories without making either himself the star or himself the omniscient narrator of the foolish doings of Them.

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.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
richardderus | 26 outras críticas | Sep 24, 2022 |
How are myths created and legends made? We all make them and we remember and retell our history, but some of us are much better at this than others. This book reminded me of the weekend I spent in Venezuela with the Harding Chorale and of the few days I spent alone in Barcelona with no plan and ended up writing a song and singing a duet with the preacher's wife in a wedding. Crazy!
 
Assinalado
RandomWally | 49 outras críticas | Jun 6, 2022 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
4
Also by
5
Membros
1,703
Popularidade
#15,064
Avaliação
½ 3.5
Críticas
111
ISBN
42
Línguas
8

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