Spirited Men: Story, Soul and Substance

by Brian Doyle

This recollection of essays offers resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men.

Genres: Biography

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.

Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:

* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.

As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.

Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).

Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doyle pays homage to an interesting collection of men - many of whom I didn't know much about. The writing style didn't make it easy though. I read it because he wrote about Jim Kjelgaard, a favorite author of my youth.

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doyle dons his scholar's cap for these reported essays on writers, musicians and other "men of immense spiritual substance, prayerful fury, enormous grace, wonderful attentiveness to miracle." Those are qualities worth probing, methinks, and this is a fine exploration.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this collection of essays on a diverse group of men.