Author Description

"For the past decade the brilliant journalist and essayist David Samuels has been contributing virtuosic reporting to Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker, among other places. This book brings together his best work, writings depicting America as a land populated by outcasts and dreamers who seek to abolish the past and make themselves new." "In Only love Can Break Your Heart, Samuels writes with a reportorial acumen and stylistic flair that recalls the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Combining elegant, nuanced personal essays with far-out reporting - on the lives of radicals in the Pacific Northwest, anti-abortion zealots, demolition experts, suburban hip-hop stars, and more - Samuels shows us an American landscape whose unsettling mix of profound dislocations and blue-sky optimism is both instantly recognizable and thrillingly new. With cool, often hilarious precision, Samuels captures the discontents of Nineties prosperity and the repressive psychic and political landscape that emerged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks."--Jacket.