Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by David Samuels

Writing for Harper's and the New Yorker over the last decade, David Samuels has penned a disillusioned love song to the often amusing and sometimes fatal American habit of self-delusion, reporting from a landscape peopled by salesmen, dreamers, radical environmentalists, suburban hip-hop stars, demolition experts, aging baseball legends, billionaire crackpots, and dog track bettors whose heartbreaking failures and occasional successes are illuminated by flashes of anger and humor. Including profiles of Pacific Northwest radicals and Nevada nuclear test site workers alongside coverage of Pentagon press conferences and the Super Bowl in Detroit, Only Love Can Break Your Heart proves Samuels to be a wonderful inheritor of the great journalistic tradition established by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion in the 1960s. This first collection of his painstakingly reported and wildly inventive writing reveals the full spectrum of his talents, as well as an unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances bubbling up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of ordinary citizens who struggle to live out their dreams.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

372 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[Hank Stuever · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collected magazine articles the author wrote in the late 1990s/early 2000s. In my favorite ones, the premium is on the reporting and not so much on the voice; you know within the first two paragraphs what the story is going to be about, except in a very few of his pieces that take a loping approach. That said, I think he has a pretty terrific personal voice/style and he knows when to end a paragraph and not follow every single digression that magically presents itself. He doesn't seem to have fallen hopelessly in love with his own words; there's a melancholy thread through all of it. Many of his peers at magazines can take any assignment and turn it into a quest for the new definition of manliness (or the meaning of the universe) vis-a-vis tragedy or popular culture. He's got a little of that too, but not too much, not to a distracting degree.

[Eric Randolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samuels is the quintessential slacker journalist - a beautiful writer who tramps around places talking to whoever he comes across, not really all that interested in wherever he is (a Superbowl, a dog track, a blimp...) but recording it all with a detached melancholy interspersed with moments of brilliant insight.

[Billie Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an interested time capsule of the late 1990's- early 2000's. The first third I really enjoyed the in depth perspective of events, the middle felt more personal for the author and less universal. and the ending stories swung back to exploring subjects many remember from that time. With that said, it's obviously dated, but some of the stories were very well detailed snap shots. It was also refreshing to read articles that were researched in depth vs the short, shallow articles that fill the online news sources.

[Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, a compilation of Samuels' republished articles from magazines like Harper's, the New Yorker, and GQ, starts off with a flash of brilliance. The Preface, "The Golden Land of Mini-Moos," is a conflicted farewell to the moribund hustle of long-form magazine journalism. The first chapter, a surreal insider's glimpse of the nightmarish sequel to Woodstock that went down in 1999, is excellent.

The momentum stands strong with an article about radical eco-terrorists in Oregon and a look at a supremely depressing pyramid scheme in California, but the book begins to sag a bit under the weight of the lofty expectations it sets early on. An article about nuclear testing sites drags, and the piece on building demolition is interminable. But then, it's a compilation, so you can skip a piece or two and not lose pace.

Regardless, at his best moments, Samuels captures the fulfillment, deferral, and denial of the American Dream as well as any non-fiction writer I've read.

I will close out with one of my favorite passages, for reasons I can't quite explain:

"At this moment, however, the Marriott kennel dogs are displaying their championship qualities by pinning me against the fence of their enclosure. As the dogs surge forward, they take turns leaping with their paws extended and hitting me full in the chest in what I interpret as a playful but concerted attempt to knock me down. I breathe slowly in and out while the pressure builds behind my eyes. As the dogs in back push toward the front, and the dogs in front worm their way in between my legs and up to my face, drooling, nuzzling, and sticking their warm wet tongues through their muzzles, I start to relax and enjoy the experience, which is oddly therapeutic in a way that I associate with swimming naked with dolphins or being buried up to my neck in mud."

[Chavi · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' is a collection of magazine pieces by the journalist David Samuels. The book is difficult to rate because the quality is inconsistent, though it leans towards mediocre, with a few standouts.
The first essay, "Woodstock 1999", is an excellent mix of fact, insight, and storytelling. The tone is conversational, a little ironic, a little nostalgic, a little nonplussed by the state of the universe.
Aside from that, my favorite pieces were the personal ones - "Being Paul McCartney", about the kind of man he is and the kind of man he's trying to be for his girlfriend, "Life is full of important choices," about living in New York post 9/11.
As a Detroiter, I also enjoyed the piece on Detroit.
The rest of the essays follow a similar format, and I found myself skipping through them. He describes the main character of the story, and simply reports on his time with them - things they said, what they were wearing, what they did.
He was trying to be the fly on the wall, to 'show not tell', to give us the story wholesale, and let us draw conclusions. To me, it just felt remote and formulaic.

[Andrew McMillen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of essays by one of the finest living American non-fiction writers. After I finished reading this, I turned to the front and started over. There's just so much to learn from how Samuels frames scenes and characters. His essay on Woodstock 1999, in particular, has changed how I’ll look at writing about music festivals in future. Like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s ‘Upon This Rock’, it’s barely about the bands who played, but the scenes he witnessed and the people he met. 'The Light Stuff', his essay on blimps, was inspiring, too: Samuels manages to mine extreme depths of technical information and minutiae while still ensuring that the story is never less than engaging and compelling. The essay about nuclear warhead testing grounds, ‘Buried Suns’, was another standout. A few of the shorter pieces were forgettable, but the long stuff for Harper’s and the New Yorker is just brilliant. I highly recommend this book to any writer who works in non-fiction.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART by David Samuels

In this collection of Essays, Samuels shows the destruction of human spirit and crushing life that afflicts many of the people that he encounters as he travels the country for Harpers magazine. He meets all kinds of people in the underside of American life, from a washed up ball player to recovering addicts. The tone is bleak and discouraging, but the writing is strong and engaging making this collection a paradox. You want to read the fine writing, but you cannot take the substance.
I would not hesitate to recommend this to an overly happy person – they need to be moderated – yet I would not dream to hand this over to Uncle Bill, the depressed loner down the street. As for everyone else, read it in stages.

[Joseph]

So far I've learned that reporters, especially human interest essayists, are voyeurs. This one is either a cynic, pessimist, or a realist. I'll let you know when I've finished the book.

Well, I don't remember where I got the recommendation for this book. I read several essays and decided that the author was working out his personal issues with our broken culture. However, eventually I got bored with him so I skipped to the title essay, and guess what? It was on dog racing! Goodbye.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only picked this book because I thought the title and cover art were intriguing. They put a hip package around some fairly traditional magazine articles. As Samuels states in the intro, people don't read general interest magazines like Harper's anymore.

The articles I liked--Woodstock 99, his personal story about 9/11--I really liked. Some I couldn't finish.It was still an interesting cross-section of America. Like a magazine would be.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked some of the pieces more than others; the problem with magazine anthologies. The intro, about the perils of freelancing was very funny and there was a great essay on the difference between reading and writing, with a long digression about J.D. Salinger which makes the collection worthwhile alone, though. Some of them I couldn't get through but maybe I just wasn't interested enough in the subject matter' he just did a very good piece on the pot business for The New Yorker.

[Jennifer Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this collection, but there was something about Samuels' writing that didn't appeal to me. He had great stories to tell - Woodstock 99 (the MTV/corporate/garbage-creating/riot-inspiring debacle), Derby Lane (the old school dog track in St. Pete), anarchists in Oregon - but there was always something missing, or he seemed to drop the really interesting parts of the story for some personal observation that was either depressing or annoying.

[Kyla · Rating 3 out of 5]

the opening essay on Woodstock 99 is worth the price of admission alone. Sadly - not his fault, he's a terrific writer - but the rest of the collection can't hold up. They are magazine pieces - assignments, bios, puff pieces...I want to read his real words.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The journalistic essays (like the one about the family that dynamites the shit out of big buildings) are pretty interesting. But all of the pieces are definitely better read in a magazine, spread out; the same tone and meandering writing style are a bit much in one book.

[amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

should really revise up to five stars, or four and one half

[Michael]

http://www.observer.com/2008/ivy-leag...

[Chris Estey · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's like the KLF of magazine writers; don't attempt this after him. 'What the fuck's going on?'