FROM THE PUBLISHER

Whether recounting events from his past or examining the details of his current experience as a writer, teacher, traveler, and general witness of the world, Reynolds Price shows us how a writer finds meaning in the day-to-day details of living. In this engaging collection of fifty-two personal essays originally aired on NPR's All Things Considered, Price explores topics that range from family and faith to capital punishment and his adventures while navigating an immensely inaccessible America in a wheelchair. Throughout, Price never loses sight of the origin or spirit of the essay -- in French, essayer means to try or attempt -- and each piece is a well-informed, revealing, often amusing and refreshing foray into a moment unlike any other we've shared with him.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In 1995, NPR's All Things Considered commissioned acclaimed Southern novelist Price (Kate Vaiden; Roxanna Slade; etc.) to contribute occasional editorial commentaries on any subject he chose. The results, along with an earlier Christmas story written for NPR's Morning Edition, are collected here, voicing Price's thoughts on topics ranging from the movies to the writing life to family relations. Recurring themes that he explores with particularly compelling insight include the cultural and emotional blessings of a small-town Southern boyhood, the difficulties--and surprising advantages--of being physically disabled (Price has been confined to a wheelchair for about 15 years after a bout with spinal cancer), and the richness of his experiences as both a student and a teacher. Price displays an impressive talent for using few words to convey a great deal, as he does in "The Last Great Weeper," where, musing on his tendency to cry at unexpected moments, he concludes that he is moved to tears by seeing "our kind at the highest pitch of skill and luck... those moments where somebody gets something right. Exactly right, the rarest event." Although ranging in tone from elegiac to angry, these pieces mostly evince a thoughtful optimism, chronicling and celebrating the small but significant pleasures of everyday life. While undoubtedly appealing to fans of Price's NPR broadcasts, this collection will also be of value to admirers of his fiction, as it offers a panoramic glimpse of the writer's mind at work. Price's readers and NPR listeners--even if they heard these commentaries on the air--will find it a delight. The brevity and broad range of these pieces also makes this an ideal introduction to this important novelist for readers who do not know his work. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

You've heard him on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Now Price has selected 52 of these commentaries for your reading pleasure--one a week for the entire year. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

Bursts of on-air intelligence from the distinguished novelist. Invited by a radio producer to recount a memory of Christmas past, Price (Letter to a Man in the Fire, 1999, etc.) caught the radio bug, and began to contribute short essays for NPR to broadcast whenever the news was slow."For each piece aired," he writes,"I'd receive a sum of money that would buy dinner for two at a modest good restaurant." While hardly lucrative, the work, he continues, was beneficial to his larger career as a writer: it forced him to trim his already lean prose to fit into three- and four-minute slots, and to honor deadlines. This collection gathers a year's worth of weekly columns that are, in the main, indeed lean—and full of strikingly well-told little stories. One is that Christmas memoir, which recounts an unexpected gift from a Roman beggar and is a marvel of verbal economy; another offers a fond portrait of the endlessly interesting, ancient doyenne Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about whom he writes,"to sit two feet from a smiling vital woman whose mind could leap from a Georgetown dinner in the late 1960s to the frozen Delaware and the Father of our Country in 1776 was a salutary shock"); others drop names—Orson Welles, Ronald Reagan, Ingrid Bergman—shamelessly, but more still honor Price's unfamous relatives and ancestors and other citizens innocent of celebrity. Just a few of the pieces seem hurried and obligatory, among them an unremarkable complaint about the humdrum business of the book tour and an anti-television screed tailor-made for a fund drive. The occasional clinker aside, though, most of Price's radio bits, likethecommentaries of fellow NPR denizen Andrei Codrescu, translate well onto the printed page and hold up to repeated readings. For Price's many admirers and those new to his work alike, a worthy addition.