Serious Face

Starred review from February 14, 2022
New York Times Magazine writer Mooallem (This Is Chance!) “whip through our colossal, mystifying, stupidly beautiful world” in this rich collection of essays. “A House at the End of the World” profiles B.J. Miller, the executive director of a Zen Hospice in California who pioneered the notion that death is a “human experience instead of primarily a medical one,” and “This Story About Charlie Kaufman Has Changed” offers a portrait of the elusive auteur Kaufman, filled with Mooallem’s first drafts that received “discouraging feedback.” A number of the essays deal with clashes between humans and nature: in “We Have Fire Everywhere,” a show-stopping piece about the Paradise, Calif., wildfire, the heat—and trapped motorists’ terror—are brought to vivid life, as is a sense that “something was different now. Fire was winning, finding ways to overpower our fight response.” And “Why These Instead of Others,” the harrowing story of two friends’ Alaskan kayaking trip that goes awry, turns into a portrait of human resilience and helplessness. Mooallem has a real knack for evoking places, people, and emotions, and the individuals he writes about put a human face on larger issues such as climate change and conservation. This is well worth the price of admission. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
A master essayist ranges far and wide with aplomb. In his latest book, New York Times Magazine writer at large Mooallem gathers a diverse dozen of his thoughtful, probing essays. He suggests that the thread holding them together is one line: "Why are we not better than we are?" In an emotional, inspirational essay about B.J. Miller, a triple-amputee palliative-care physician, the author describes how Miller has dedicated his life to a profound question: "What is a good death?" In a harrowing, suspenseful personal piece about a kayak trip with two friends in Alaska when Mooallem was in his 20s, the author recounts one friend being hit by a falling tree, suffering serious injuries, and the unlikely, lifesaving Coast Guard rescue. "This is My Serious Face" is a witty essay about Mooallem's doppelg�nger, a famous, graceful bullfighter who looked just like him, complete with the "conspicuously crooked" face that has people "scrutinizing its angles, considering it as an object." After a heart-rending piece on human threats to Hawaii's endangered monk seals, Mooallem offers up a brief yet profound look at a looming crisis inherent in the "prisoner reentry program" in the U.S., which "tends to focus on solving structural problems, like providing housing, job training, or drug treatment, but easily loses sight of the profound disorientation of the individual people being released." The author's narrative prowess is on full display in a powerful, tragic essay on the wildfire devastation in Paradise, California, leaving "a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live." An insightful profile of acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman--"known for films so rich with surreality and self-referential lunacy that they feel as if they might be spun apart by the force of their strangeness, yet miraculously cohere"--playfully collapses in on itself, and Mooallem closes with a reflective inquiry on Neanderthals, Gibraltar Man, and how we use flawed information to reach feelings of "superiority over other people." A winning, captivating, engrossing collection.

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Starred review from May 1, 2022
In his third book, following This Is Chance! (2020), journalist-at-large 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--from hospice care and the greater American medical system to the prison-industrial complex, conservation efforts, and the current COVID-19 pandemic--cause and exacerbate problems with sometimes devastating and irreversible results. In the one previously unpublished essay, Mooallem considers what the pandemic has revealed, from a lack of accountability to the burden of stress pushed onto individuals and guilt about the state of the world we're making. Other essays that sing are those in which he examines his own experiences, such as accepting his doppelg�nger, a famous bullfighter, or spending hours of COVID isolation with one of today's premier filmmakers. Also included are his signature deep dives into idiosyncratic lives, from a man who created his own museum to a pigeon-based Ponzi scheme and a fervent community inspired by clouds. Readers will laugh and tear up as Mooallem makes us care about his subjects and feel better off for knowing their stories.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.