Only Love Can Break Your Heart » (Reprint)

David Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, David Samuels writes with a reportorial acumen and stylistic flair that recall the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Combining elegant, nuanced personal essays with far-out reporting—on the lives of radicals in the Pacific Northwest, anti-abortion zealots, demolition experts, suburban hip-hop stars, and more—Samuels shows us an American landscape whose unsettling mix of profound dislocations and blue-sky optimism is both instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.

These essays display his unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances that bubble up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of salesman, dreamers, aging baseball legends, crackpots, atomic test site workers, and dog track bettors who struggle to live out their dreams one day at a time.

The New York Times - Jascha Hoffman

The source of both tragedy and humor here is the wide gap between the dreams that draw these men onward and the trail of disaster they leave behind…The portraits that emerge are exhaustive and often severe, but there is something delicate in Samuels's method. In his stories the random flow of events takes on real meaning, allowing us to see what's hidden in plain view and to hear what isn't being said. He has some of Joan Didion's gift for stripping the layers away until a fraud is exposed.

The Golden Land of Mini-Moos (a Preface)     xv
I
Woodstock 1999     3
Notes from Underground     31
The Spaceman Falls to Earth     56
The Making of a Fugitive     68
In the Age of Radical Selfishness     89
Rehab is for Quitters     103
400,000 Salesmen Can't be Wrong!     119
A Prince Among Thieves     142
Bringing Down the House     150
II
On Message     183
Buried Suns     206
Being Paul McCartney     240
Sleeping on Roads     244
Life is Full of Important Choices     248
Marginal Notes     259
The Light Stuff     269
A Fistful of Peanuts     295
The Blind Man and the Elephant     314
Only Love Can Break Your Heart     345
Source Notes     371