The Heart Is An Instrument: Portraits In Journalism [Paperback]

From the Foreword by Geneva Overholser

What is it about really fine writers, how they delight, intrigue, compel us?

Style, you say. But style is not something you begin with. Rather, it's what you end up with, a result of far more fundamental traits. Traits such as an ear and an eye and a heart, traits that Madeleine Blais has honed superbly well. 

This is a book well named:The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. Theheart is surely first among Blais's gifts. Whether she is writing about the famousplaywright Tennessee Williams, novelist Mary Gordonor about the least elevated among usa teenage prostitute infected with the AIDS virus, a homeless schizophrenicshe brings to her subjects an incomparable empathy.

MADELEINE BLAISis professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts. In 1980, while on the staff of theMiami Herald,she won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her latest book isIn These Girls Hope Is a Muscle.

Fifteen brief but sensitive vignettes and a longer epilogue by Blais, a Pulitzer-winning former writer for theMiami Herald. Blais focuses primarily on outsidera schizophrenic woman struggling to gain stability, a teenaged murderer, an 83-year-old WW I vet seeking to have his dishonorable discharge reversed. . . . Discussing her own work, Blais writes, I am most often drawn to people walking the edge, curiously undefeated. It's in portraying these marginal lives that she's most effective.Kirkus

From her portrayal of society's discards to her reporting on the famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Blais writes stories that are alive and captivating. . . . Blais writes beautifully, telling stories that illustrate the drama and importance of each life. The reader will care about these people. Blais includes a brief epilog for each chapter and concludes with a final autobiographical essay that offers advice to aspiring journalislÃÃ