The Moth

October 7, 2013
This archive of confession, catharsis, and the exuberance of truth lures readers to the storyteller's porch. Burns, artistic director of the award-winning The Moth Radio Hour, frees stories whetted for a live audience onto the page, proving the richness of great storytelling: that one can gain as much as a member of an audience communally cringing, laughing and weeping, as a reader privately surrendering to the complicity of human experience. Here, a Russian music teacher's tale of conviction in the face of machine gun-wielding soldiers is salvaged from the muffled audio of a handheld recorder; the clipped sentences of a veteran astronaut bear the fear in his voice as he recounts his crew's rescue of a spacewalk in peril; the fidelity of spoken pauses and "um's" retain the essence of Kimberly Reed's humor as she describes her long-lost hometown's embrace of her gender transition in the wake of her father's death. These selections bespeak the importance and popularity of The Moth as a storytelling venue. A live audience is wanted at times; some jokes are lost on the page without the accompaniment of audience laughter. However, these stories capturing the "biggest moments of their lives" remind us that those who are willing to be vulnerable are our best teachers.

August 1, 2013
Storytellers from a diverse array of backgrounds present true tales via a New York-based organization broadcasting at themoth.org. For all its vital cultural roots, storytelling makes a strange bedfellow with the printed page. In this self-congratulatory volume--readers can plow through a preface, a foreword and an introduction before even getting to the first story--stories originally told before live audiences are transcribed and edited to no discernible purpose, considering that they are all available in their original formats on the website. The stories run the gamut from childhood memories to love and marriage to illness, crime, war and family secrets, with several epiphanies thrown in for good measure. Some are quite moving--e.g., rapper Darryl "DMC" McDaniels' account of how Sarah McLachlan's music saved him from depression and geneticist Paul Nurse's discovery that the woman he had thought was his sister was actually his mother. Malcolm Gladwell's "Her Way" manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking in its evocation of a friendship's end. Others that should pack a punch, including writer Jillian Lauren's "The Prince and I," about her stint as a courtesan to the Sultan of Brunei, fall flat on the page. Therein lies the problem with this anthology: These stories are meant to be experienced in a live venue, where listeners can immerse themselves in each teller's unique sense of tone and timing. Unlike personal essays, stories require give and take from an audience, which prompts the question: Why bother printing these in an age when people who couldn't attend the original sessions can easily access live footage online? Other contributors include A.E. Hotchner, Adam Gopnik, Sebastian Junger and Nathan Englander. Comes across as a vanity project that does little credit to the storytelling process.

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