Love and Other Ways of Dying

January 12, 2015
Readers familiar with Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert and The Telling Room know just how quirky his storytelling can be. Fans of solid narrative nonfiction will appreciate the breadth of subject matter and depth of reporting evident in his latest collection, which pulls together 17 pieces previously published in such venues as the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. Throughout, he manages to inject his own personality without straying too far from the topic at hand. “The Accident,” for example, recalls a decades-ago car crash in his hometown that killed a childhood friend. Paterniti recognizes the perspective that distance, both physical and metaphorical, can afford: “We were teenagers then. We knew everything—and nothing. What we lacked was context, wisdom, time on earth... some of which we have now.” “The House that Thurman Munson Built” celebrates an early hero of his, a catcher for the New York Yankees in the 1970s. Other selections visit China (“The Suicide Catcher”) and Cambodia (“Never Forget”). Still others deal with the fundamentals of eating. “He Might Just Be a Prophet” and “The Last Meal” focus on Ferran Adria’s El Bulli restaurant and cancer-stricken former French president Francois Mitterrand’s final repast, respectively. Whether writing about tragedy, sports, politics, or food, Paterniti effectively creates vivid worlds. He transports his audience, managing to simultaneously entertain and enlighten.

Starred review from December 15, 2014
A collection of long-form nonfiction from GQ and New York Times Magazine contributor Paterniti (The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese, 2013, etc.). The Telling Room was one of the most critically acclaimed books of 2013, and this carefully curated selection of features demonstrates the breadth of the author's peculiar, personal style of storytelling. There are familiar pieces-Paterniti's account of ferrying Einstein's brain around the country is front and center, as is "The Fifteen-Year Layover," which recounts the long exile of the refugee who spent 15 years at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Others are lovingly crafted portraits of interesting people like "The Giant," whom Paterniti sought out in Ukraine after reading reports of a man well over 8 feet tall. The author has spent a considerable amount of time overseas, and he recounts his trip to China to meet the man credited with stopping hundreds of suicides on a bridge over the Yangtze River, as well as his journey in Japan following the 2011 tsunami. However, Paterniti is not limited to merely capturing great stories. Another pair of articles deliciously describes food and the people who craft it into wonderful things: the author's portrait of Spanish chef Ferran Adria and a similarly mouthwatering feature, "The Last Meal," in which the author re-creates the final orgiastic meal of French President Francois Mitterrand. This is journalism unlike the standard fare found in newspapers and tabloid magazines and a tribute to the durability of the human spirit. In a lovely but spare introduction, the author summarizes the process of creating this collection: "If The Game was fantasy and The Work has been cold reality, in both cases they've come to represent, at least for me, the same underlying need to make sense of the way that love and loss, justice and devastation, and beauty and pain can fuse to make some bearable, or at least fathomable, whole." Real-world storytelling of the highest order.

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March 15, 2015

Journalist Paterniti (The Telling Room) is a frequent contributor to Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine, and it was in those heavyweight publications that these 17 essays originally saw print. The author is a practitioner of "longform" journalism, a style that is essentially just "new journalism" rebranded for an audience who prefers information served in 140-character portions. There are several reasons why Paterniti's editors give him the freedom to weave his yarns at great length; for one, he's possessed of the rare ability to craft long sentences that don't run-on. And his narratives are vehicles for rich, visual descriptions; his writing has an almost-cinematic quality that guides the reader's mental camera effortlessly through his characters' physical and psychological landscapes. Paterniti identifies closely with his subjects--often to one specific person to whom he has become attached--and they in turn kindle the obsessions that drive his journalism. Although a subtle humor abounds, Paterniti shows his greatest strength in his depictions of tragedy, as he investigates a terrible plane crash, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and a bridge in China that is popular for suicides. Here, he dramatizes his reporting while avoiding melodrama and, somehow, conveys the terrible, angry grief that is awakened by loss. VERDICT A wide variety of places and people are given Paterniti's trademark scrutiny here, and the resulting essays are illuminating and pleasantly verbose. Because it is a collection of writing from popular press, this should have broad appeal. In particular, those who remain in unplanned withdrawal from David Foster Wallace's nonfiction should give this book a shot.--Chris Wieman, Univ. of the Sciences Libs., Philadelphia

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