Full name: The Devil Problem And Other True Stories

Author: David Remnick Year: 1996 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Writing, Essays Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780679777526 0679777520

Readers know from his now classic Lenin's Tomb that Remnick is a superb portraitist who can bring his subjects to life and reveal them in such surprising ways as to justify comparison to Dickens, Balzac, or Proust. In this collection, Remnick's gift for character is sharper than ever, whether he writes about Gary Hart stumbling through life after Donna Rice or Mario Cuomo, who now presides over a Saturday morning radio talk show, fielding questions from crackpots, or about Michael Jordan's awesome return to the Chicago Bulls -- or Reggie Jackson's last times at bat. Remnick's portraits of such disparate characters as Alger Hiss and Ralph Ellison, Richard Nixon and Elaine Pagels, Gerry Adams and Marion Barry are unified by this extraordinary ability to create a living character, so that the pieces in this book, taken together, constitute a splendid pageant of the representative characters of our time. Similar books: Giving Good Weight by John McPhee We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean Living Out Loud by Anna Quindlen Just Enough Liebling by A. J. Liebling Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie Table of Contents by John McPhee Halls of Fame by John D'Agata The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem After Henry by Joan Didion Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace Pieces of the Frame by John McPhee Feel Free by Zadie Smith The Patch by John McPhee Habitations of the Word by William H. Gass Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell The Purloined Clinic by Janet Malcolm The Wet Collection by Joni Tevis The Next American Essay by John D'Agata