Susan Sheehan, Howard Means

Broschiertes Buch

The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer

Hobbies, Collecting, and Other Passionate Pursuits

Beschreibung

We Americans love to look at ourselves. How we vote, where we work, what we think about church and school -- studying ourselves is a national pastime. What has been missing in all this self-examination, until now, is a book about the greatest national obsessions of all: the hobbies we pursue, the collections and amateur sports to which we devote so much of our lives. The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer chronicles the amazing variety of ways in which we relax, compete with others and ourselves, and indulge some of our richest fantasies. Here are wonderfully warm and witty accounts of Americans as they: attempt to swim all the Great Lakes, often in horrible conditions; quit a job and begin raising sheep to accommodate a newfound passion for spinning; eat at every McDonald's in the nation; carve The Last Supper from wood; cross all the world's suspension bridges; build huge banana sculptures; roller blade, scull, and bake; and collect marbles, Noah's arks, talking birds, and much more. In these pages you'll meet a marvelous array of ordinary people who do unusual things, sometimes to extremes, as they define for themselves worlds of imagination, contest, and excellence. These are people who thrill to the chase and sometimes plain wear themselves out having fun, whether it's flying kites as big as a king-size mattress, canoeing in the Canadian wilderness, or meticulously recording the daily details of their everyday existence. In Working, Studs Terkel gave us an unforgettable oral history of the working life of an earlier generation. The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer is a history for our own times -- of the passionate pursuits by which so many of us define ourselves and of the universal search for happiness and a sense of fulfillment. Maybe you'll find yourself in the forty people profiled here. Maybe you'll find a hobby that you'll want to make your own. Either way, your life is likely to be enriched, just as the lives of the people you will read about are enriched by the depth of their commitment and the beauty of their accomplishments.

Autor

Susan Sheehan graduated from Wellesley College in 1958, worked as a fact checker for Esquire for a year and a half, started writing book reviews for the New Republic in 1959, and light pieces for the New Yorker in 1960. After contributing "casuals" and Talk of the Town stories to the New Yorker, she became a staff writer for the magazine in 1961 and wrote her first nonfiction series in 1963.In 1965, Sheehan flew to Jakarta, Indonesia, to marry Neil Sheehan, a New York Times foreign correspondent she had met in New York City a few months earlier. In the summer of 1965, Neil was transferred to Saigon, where Sheehan wrote her first book, Ten Vietnamese, which was published in 1967. By then, Neil had been transferred to the Washington bureau of the Times. Sheehan commuted to New York for the next few decades, during which time she continued to write for the Times, the Boston Globe, and Washingtonian, in addition to authoring eight books. Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, published in 1982, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1983. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, and the Open Society Institute. She served as the chair of the Pulitzer Prize nominating jury for general nonfiction in 1988 and 1994, and as a member of that jury in 1991. She was also a contributing writer for Architectural Digest for fifteen years. Most recently, she reviewed books for the Outlook section of the Washington Post.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Seitenzahl: 312
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. August 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 442g
• ISBN-13: 9781416575207
• ISBN-10: 1416575200
• Artikelnr.: 23267016