Gay Talese now focuses on his own life--the zeal for the
truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling
precision, that won accolades for his journalism and
best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about
The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia
(Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor's Wife),
and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant
experience (Unto the Sons).
How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated,
blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur
beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb
at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger
canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and
then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race
from his student days in the Deep South to a recent
interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered
the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his
reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has
written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look
at the lives--and their meaning--of Lorena and John Bobbitt.
He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of
Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and
heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with
the head of a Mafia family.
But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary
men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work.
In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single
restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic
of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed
while a successor's were born. And as he delves into the
life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his
consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.
In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives
us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and
meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear
that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has
the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and
the desire to get it right.
Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned--a dazzling book about
the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.
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