Other People Takes & Mistakes [Paperback]

Other Peopleis something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays that form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but an intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness.
 
Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, what function does art serve?Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields sustains a piercing focus on the multiplicity of perspectives, the irreducible log jam of human information, and the possibilities and impossibilities for human connection.“A triumphantly humane book . . . Shields is our elusive, humorous ironist, something like a 21st century Socrates. . . . He’s a master stylist—and has been for a long time, on the evidence of these pieces from throughout his career. The collection can stand as a textbook for contemporary creative nonfiction: erudite, soulful and self-deprecating like John Jeremiah Sullivan; freewheeling and insatiably curious like Geoff Dyer; hilarious and precise like Elif Batuman; and always fresh, clean, vigorous and clear . . . The book’s collective tone . . . is strikingly gentle, amiable and above all unpretentious. . . . All good writers make us feel less alone. But Shields makes us feelbetter. He takes some of the bad of our everyday life and our culture and the whole inescapable mess of being human and sends it back to us as good.” —Clancy Martin,The New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant and joyously readable . . . one of America’s most accomplished and best writers. . . . In his certainty of getting other people wrong, David Shields is vastly more profound, entertaining, memorable and trustworthy than armies of writers whose prelÓÎ