Only Love Can Break Your Heart

By David Samuels

Book 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1595581871
• ISBN13: 9781595581877
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Singing words, words between the lines of age...

On the surface, this collection offers dependable entertainment with its blend of sharp reporting and compassionate, good-humored storytelling. But woven throughout the stories is a provocative concept ignited in the reader's mind by Samuels' preface: that perhaps we owe it to ourselves to re-configure our notions about identity, and all the goals that follow. "My story has something to do with our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves up from scratch, which is much the same thing as believing in the future," Samuels writes, noting younger generations' struggles to find a sense of self when traditional mainstays like family dinners are less prominent. To suffice, we grasp for concrete systems to help us feel in control -- it may be a Florida greyhound bettor who feels invincible in the face of chance. Or Oregonian anarchists who think they're making a difference when reality suggests otherwise. Or a Woodstock 1999 organizer who's lost sight of what really matters so much that music and togetherness get trumped by four-dollar water bottles and corporate detachment. The truth is, Samuels suggests, that in trying to define ourselves amid the tumult of modern America, we all get lost in the mire to some extent. "The fact that we lie like crazy while pretending to always tell the truth is such a common narrative strategy in American literature and American lives that we frequently confuse our wishful imaginings with reality." Or, as Neil Young says in the song that lends this book its name, "I have a friend I've never seen/ He hides his head inside a dream..." Samuels' writing has an intelligent, approachable eloquence that brings the traditions of literary journalism to a new level. At points, it's hard not to get entranced in his stories of dreams and disillusionment, from Pentagon meetings to more personal experiences. But with subtle precision and piercing insight, Samuels colors every page with his particular wisdom. It's as if each piece were written for this book -- though the fact that this isn't the case lends a beautiful fluidity to the collection. He respects our ability to parse the stories for ourselves, taking from them what we choose. Each story offers a layer, creating what in the end is a new portrait of the reader's unique sense of self and appreciation of others.

David Samuels Rocks!

Thank heavens someone has had the good sense to put together this great sampling of the redoubtable Mr. Samuels' best work. Intelligence and wit like his are rare enough in journalism--add his unmatchable tenderness and empathy and you get a truly unique voice. This is going to be one of those books I read once and then keep around to dip into whenever I need a lift. Here's hoping Samuels is bluffing when he says he's leaving magazine writing for good, because he'll be sorely missed.

New New Journalism

This is one of the best collections I have read in years. It really reminded me of the old school New Journalism days of Wolfe and Didion. I had read a few of these pieces in Harper's (I'm a big Harper's reader) but I didn't know most of them. Nearly all were funny and stylish and hold up to repeated reading.

Extraordinary Writer

A terrific collection -- pulls the world apart, weighs the cogs, looks at the gears, then puts it back together again. Samuels is wrong: it's not only love that breaks hearts; the right word can do it, the perfect thought can do, and Samuels demonstrates this again and again.

DAMN, what a great book

I don't usually like collections, but this one propelled me through such an amazingly surreal and beautiful American landscape--emotionally, it goes from sea to shining sea--that it seemed like a novel. I loved the pieces about the dog track, the anarchists in Portland and the Super Bowl with Stevie Wonder.