Us: Americans Talk About Love
By:
John Bowe
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List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Description:
From the wards of New Orleans to the cornfields of Iowa to the slopes of Colorado, from the raves of Los Angeles to the hollows of Appalachia and the canyons of Wall Street, Americans talk about love. Tortured teenagers, free-spirited octogenarians, anxious Navy wives, blue-blooded bohemians, horny-but-chaste pastors, and multiply-partnered cosmopolitans tell extraordinary tales of broken hearts; sexual infidelities; improbable reconciliations; hidden, forbidden, preposterous love; and endurance against all odds. These are America’s real love stories—wise and foolish, comic and tragic, full of surprises and straight from the heart.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Release Date: 2010-01-05
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Huge Disappointment - After hearing John Bowe on NPR and reading a profile of him and this book in the NY Times, I had high expectations for this book. On NPR Bowe spoke eloquently and incisively about his own troubled experiences with love that led him to compile this book. If only his voice were present in the book's essays as opposed to those that are there. No new ground is broken, no revelations, not even a spark of insight. Just lots of dull, self-interested droning about some successful and some not-so-successful love affairs.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
love - Ok. but not great. Taped interviews with people of different ages. Nothing new for me.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
For anyone who wants to believe in TRUE LOVE, BUY THIS BOOK! - In a lesser writer's hands, this book could have come off as schmaltzy as the latest romantic comedy movie-dreck that Hollywood pops out with alarmingly senseless regularity.
Instead, it's a vibrant portrait of love in its many shapes, sizes, colors... none of them simple, all of them real.
Skip the tired attempt at the movie theater and spend a night at home with this book. You'll be all the better for it. And after you've read it, at long last, you'll finally know the true historical culprit that drives us all to our best and to our worst: LOVE.
Buy it now!
Perry
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
These are your people - get to know them - John Bowe has done us a service with this book - as well as we might think we know our fellow Americans, we have a lot to learn.
These are the sorts of stories that make one think twice when gazing surreptitiously at some odd couple on the subway or at the gas station. They make it much harder to forget that everyone we see, no matter how poorly they may appear to fit in the matrix of what we call normal, wants, needs or grapples with that thing we call love - just like us.
And with each character given free rein to share their own very idiosyncratic version of an experience virtually all of us share, this book dodges a trap. Bowe never suggests that he knows what love is, why it is, what makes it work or why it fails. He never privileges one kind of love over another. By arranging the tales according to the duration of the relationship, Bowe chooses the one metric that can be called truly objective. He doesn't try to line them up by their level of success or failure. He lets each stand on its own, unburdened by any ranking, assessment or judgment.
That decision on Bowe's part disappointed at least one reviewer here ("Mr Bowe does not use the voices of his interview subjects to enlighten us on the topic ....what can we really learn about love from their stories?"), but rather than being a weakness I think this ranks among the book's greatest strengths. The reading experience is uncluttered by Bowe's personality, or those of his many assistants. The reader is left free to decide what these stories tell us about love in general, or our own loves.
Readers seeking more direction can easily find it - the bookstores are full of tomes describing what love SHOULD be, or how it SHOULD work; I even remember a series of jelly jar glasses decorated with naked children that purported to be guides to love ("love is ... the greatest feeling you can feel!").
That's not what Bowe is offering. This book provides evidence - painstakingly extracted evidence - not an argument. The reader is left free to consider what this his or her own love affairs look like in the light of that evidence. Forty, sixty or a hundred years from now, when other, more prescriptive love-tomes have been rendered dated and obsolete, this book will serve its purpose just as well as it does today.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
LOVE FOR VALENTINE'S DAY - It may be the full moon, or karma, or the stars were lined up in the right order, but whatever the cause, it is a wonderful book to come out for Valentine's Day. Did Bowe or his publisher plan it that way? I hope so. My wife and I have read a few segments together, and enjoyed it every time. It helped define love for us, and what keeps people together for the long haul, or in the short run as the case may be. It is also a good book to read a few pages at a time, and then pick it up when times and schedules permit. For me, it was a page turner, and I often found myself skipping other reading because I wanted to read the next love story...A good book for contemplation and meditation about your personal future with your loved one. Read it together like we did.
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