Serious Face: Essays

by Jon Mooallem

From the discovery of the author's face in a century-old photograph to a triple-amputee hospice director working at the border of life and death, here are thirteen hopeful, heartbreaking, and profound essays from "one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors working today" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Lit Hub

Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion--a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from California's deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and more--all with a deep conviction that it's our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us.

Mooallem's powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing "as much art as it is journalism," and Jia Tolentino has praised his "grace and command." In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Short Stories, History, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Nature

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 17, 2022

About the author

Jon Mooallem is a longtime writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a contributor to numerous radio shows and other magazines, including This American Life and Wired. He has spoken at TED and collaborated with members of the Decemberists on musical storytelling projects.

His latest book, THIS IS CHANCE!, about the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 and radio reporter Genie Chance, will be published in March, 2020. His first book, Wild Ones, was chosen as a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR’s Science Friday, and Canada’s National Post, among others.

He lives on Bainbridge Island, outside Seattle, with his family.

Reviews

[Pooja Peravali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throughout the essays in this book, Jon Mooallem dives into the pathos and bathos of everyday life.

The first book of essays I ever read was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is admittedly a very high bar to beat. Since then I've read a handful of books of essays, and generally enjoyed them all.

What really works for this book is the sense of gentle tragedy that Mooallem brings to the fore in many of the essays, tempered with an edge of wistfulness. For the most part he tackled issues I'd never heard of, and I liked the very human side he brought out in his subjects. Life can sometimes be very inexplicable and weird, and the author does a good job of showing this.

However, I didn't enjoy the essays that leaned into more mainstream subjects as much as I did the others, though I am unsure why. I think it may be because the author did not tease out the reasons why we should care as much as he did with the more obscure subjects.

My favorite essays in this book were "Why These Instead of Others?," which is about an accident that befell Mooallem's friend in a remote region, and "A Cloud Society," about an amateur society of cloud watchers who identified a new cloud feature.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mooallem is a fantastic writer. I’m sure many people already know this since he writes for The New York Times Magazine and several other outlets, but he was new to me.

This book is a collection of essays. Each entry is a type of long-form journalism. I’d be tempted to describe them as human-interest stories, but that term seems somehow belittling, and might conjure mistaken ideas of Reader’s Digest fare. Mooallem brings something extra, something more human, to each tale he tells that makes it more than just an interesting true story, and inspires further reflection. I guess this is why he labels them essays rather than simply stories or articles.

Here’s a list of the essays along with a cursory description just to help me remember them. They’re all good but the starred ones are my favorites:

A House at the End of the World: A unique end-of-life story at a unique kind of hospice house.

*Why These Instead of Others: The author’s experience of a dramatic emergency rescue of his friend seriously injured in Alaska. Part of this rescue was filmed and became an episode of a National Geographic television series.

*This Is My Serious Face: The story of the legendary Spanish bullfighter, Manolete, whose face looks strikingly similar to Mooallem’s.

*Can You Even Believe This Is Happening (A Monk Seal Murder Mystery): Tensions develop among Hawaiian natives as they are forced to treat Monk Seals as a protected native species.

*The Outsiders: Newly released inmates face surprising and heartbreaking difficulties adjusting to normal life, and a new organization that is trying to help them.

At the Precise Center of a Dream: Quirky dude Jacques-Andre Instel founds the museum-town of Felicity, CA, officially designated as the “Official Center of the World.”

*We Have Fire Everywhere: Chilling account of a forest fire rapidly engulfing the small town of Paradise, CA, trapping hundreds in bottleneck traffic.

This Story About Charlie Kaufman Has Changed: An interview with the screenwriter conducted over many zoom meetings during the pandemic.

Swing State: An escaped (or exiled) macaque becomes the celebrity “Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay.”

Birdman: A man starts a business selling pigeons to farmers to be raised for pigeon racing. Or maybe for food. Either the worst business model or the dumbest Ponzi scheme ever.

A Cloud Society: The Cloud Appreciation Society lobbies for official recognition of a new cloud—asperitas.

*Neanderthals Were People Too: Searching for Neanderthal artifacts in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, and what we think we know about them.

*Take Me Out: The author finally leaves home after hunkering down with his family 18 months during the pandemic to go to a minor-league baseball game in Spokane, and reflects on the normal life he has been missing. Also tells the story of “Lucky Lohrke” who narrowly escaped death numerous times but didn’t feel lucky at all.

[Sandy D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wide ranging and utterly absorbing collection of essays by a gifted writer and thinker. My favorites were the examination of monk seals killings in Hawaii, a terrifying description of one woman's escape from the wildfire that killed many of her neighbors in Paradise, California, the story of a feral macaque monkey in central Florida, a bunch of cloud aficionados, and a look at Neandertals and the excavation in a cave in Gibraltar. Mooallem closes out the book with an insightful view of the pandemic and the current zeitgeist via an account of his first post-quarantine baseball game in Spokane. Although baseball bores me, his thoughts on parenting and his children's future was perfect.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite sure what the unifying theme was for this collection of essays outside of the broad idea that humanity often sucks, but sometimes it’s a little less sucky. There were some interesting and moving tidbits (the first essay, “A House at the End of the World,” about palliative end-of-life care made me bawl), but I also fell into some stretches of boredom throughout several of the essays.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love collections of essays so much. It took me forever to read this because when I find a book I love this much, I feel the need to savor it.
I am just a sucker for tender, meaningful essays that challenge me and make me cry - I cried so many times I lost track of how many.

Anyway, read this book.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Random House Publishing Group Random House for an advanced copy of this collection of essays.

The problem with living in the future is that the now and the past don't resonate as well as what we want the future to be. Living small lives, lives that people wouldn't watch a reality show about, or lives that take to long to describe on TikTok, but maybe would make a good podcast are considered hokey, so last year. Influencers are the thing, not people without followers, or an app. People especially post- pandemic seem lost, throwing themselves into anything to get them to feel something, though empathy seems to be fading fast. That is why Jon Mooallem's essay collection is so important and so necessary for our lost time. Serious Face essays remind us that people, odd, loners, criminal, innocent dreamer and schemers are the real influencers. These are the people that remind us to live.

Jon Mooallem has a gift for finding people and sharing their tales, whether writing about people who have experienced great tragedies in their life, physical or emotional. An essay about a man who lost three limbs, how the shadow of prison stays with a person, even well after he is let free. An essay on Charles Kaufman, screenwriter of classic movies, and a burgeoning almost codependence between subject and writer at the early stages of the pandemic. There are criminals, and people who see the world through a different prism, but it is the personal essays that really are touching and rewarding. A reader wants to know more almost from the first paragraph, and Jon Mooallem more than delivers.

The writing is very good, with a nice flow and an ease with the subject that makes the essay seem much more than a profile. Mooallem has a way of hooking the reader without the reader knowing it till suddenly the end of the essay is near, the eyes are a little misty and the reader feels that more of a journey has taken place, not just a simple reading. Most of the essays are excellent, none are bad or ever boring.

Recommended for the post-pandemic survivor who feels they have lost a step with humanity. A simple pass on Twitter, Facebook, or media of any kind makes one wonder why anyone would bother with humans. However essays like these remind us that people are people, flawed, failing and flailing. Some deserve praise, a lot deserve our scorn, but to not feel anything is giving up. A very good collection of essays to remind us of this. I can't wait to read more.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Back in the woods, kneeling over Jon, I was having the same problem: I didn't know what to say. He was lying near a log on his injured side, his beard and glasses flecked with dirt and tendrils of moss. He seemed to be on the brink of losing consciousness […] What can a person say? I had two literature professors in college who made us memorize poems. You never knew when some lines of verse would come in handy, they claimed. One liked to brag that, while traveling through Ireland, he found that if he spat out some Yeats at a pub, he could drink for free. This is how I wound up reciting a love poem to Jon.

[…]

Jon and I would spend about an hour and a half together alone on the forest floor. I ran through everything in my quiver—Kay Ryan, A. R. Ammons, Michael Donaghy—padding each poem with little prefatory remarks, while Jon said nothing, just signaled with his eyes or produced a sound whenever I checked in. I felt like a radio DJ playing records in the middle of the night, unsure if anyone was listening. And here’s one about owls by Richard Wilbur, I would tell Jon, and off we would go.

[…]

Even my reciting those poems, which to me had always felt like a moment of utter helplessness, became, in Jon’s telling, a perfect emblem of that streak of serendipitous problem-solving. “You conveyed a calmness,” he told me recently.”

It doesn’t feel right to call Jon Mooallem underground because he does write for the New York Times Magazine, but on the other hand I don’t know anybody who knows him, so I’m sticking with the word underground. After really enjoying his other book This Is Chance which chronicles the 1964 Anchorage earthquake, I was super excited to find this essay collection. It is an uneven collection, but also a great one.

The topics here vary wildly from seal hunting to prisoners to matadors. As in his other work what keeps me coming back to Mooallem is his ability to expand these hyper niche topics into ideas and themes that are much more universal. As Mooallem states in the introduction, he does enjoy being out and interviewing people in far flung locations, but mostly he is haunted (like many of us) by the simple question of “why are we not better than we are?” Sometimes the essays did lose momentum so I’m gonna dock a star, but when these pieces hit their stride, they are utterly fantastic. Highly recommend!

[Jug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mooallem covers a wide range of topics from endangered seal murders to a Spanish bull fighter whose face looks exactly like his with an incredible amount of heartfelt melancholy.

4.5
I don't read many collections of essays but this was really really good. Mooallem tackles so many concepts with an amazingly level-headed approach and utilizes his experience as a journalist to make his interviewees tell the stories for him. Personally I would've liked just a few happier plotlines but Mooallem's masterfully crafted pensive and mildly existential vibe combined with his pleasingly calm narration was just perfect for Austin's recent bout of rainy weather. For better or worse, I am almost always listening to something to keep the messy thoughts at bay so it's pretty damn rare that that something makes me want to just sit and stew in silence like nearly all these essays did.

I don't know if I could find myself widely recommending this since so many of these stories are just kinda sad, but Mooallem always finds a way to ground them in some context of the 21st century human experience. For every absurd pigeon farming ponzi scheme and devastating forest fire, there's a story of people finding community and the little joys that uplift them and maybe nowadays that's all you need.

Skipping work on a rainy day just so you can cozy up and sip tea to stave off your encroaching existential crisis.

[Candice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written wide topic of essays not only presenting facts, but he makes his own philosophical and sociological observations in each one which are keenly insightful, thoughtful and wise.

[Bookslut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great read, and certainly one I would never have stumbled on without a thoughtful gesture from Sarah Page. I can't recommend it enough. I laughed, I cringed, I learned, I thought, I felt. There is some real magic here.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Why are we not better than we are?” “Why are we not better than we are?”“Why are we not better than we are?”“Why are we not better than we are?” “Why are we not better than we are?”

Very readable and interesting, but I did not quite see the theme above in some of them. It is an inherently pessimistic worldview, the poem the quote came from, and the fact that the author believes that are not better unquestioningly. It is not a new question; there is a giant book about the better angels of our nature tackling this, and much modern literature answers, we aren’t, so I hope the author moving forward, does try to answer it. Some of the essays did took the question and a beautiful, human tale of redemption and hope came out, so their reply was, we are, we just have to reframe it to see the truth. Others just tried to confirm that we are not better than we are. But we are. Art, survival, laughter in the face of adversity and pain, the spiritual sweep of time are all proof.

The Outsiders | 2015 |
Carlos had done almost eleven years; Roby, close to twelve. Now they were free men, sitting outside a prison, waxing nostalgic about prison food. They waited some more. Waiting came easily to them; incarceration makes you patient.
The first ride home Carlos and Roby did together was in February 2014. They were dispatched for an early-morning pickup at San Quentin, seven hours from Los Angeles in Marin County, and Michael Romano, the director of the Three Strikes Project, suggested they drive up the day before and stay at his house in San Francisco. He expected to take them out to dinner—get to know them, spoil them a bit. Instead, Carlos and Roby rolled in after midnight and unceremoniously bedded down on a couple of couches. Lying there, it hit them how unusual this was: They were both still on parole at the time, but here they were, welcomed into this white lawyer’s home in the middle of the night, while his wife and two little children slept upstairs. “That really changed everything,” Carlos remembers. “It changed our perspective of how people actually viewed us.” He and Roby had been locked up so young that they’d never lived as regular, trustworthy adults. This, they told each other before falling asleep, must be what it feels like.

A House at the End of the World | 2017 |
Miller refused, for example, to let himself believe that his life was extra difficult now, only uniquely difficult, as all lives are. He resolved to think of his suffering as simply a “variation on a theme we all deal with: to be human is really hard,”
Don’t we all treat suffering as a disruption to existence, instead of an inevitable part of it? He wondered what would happen if you could “reincorporate your version of reality, of normalcy, to accommodate suffering.”
He remembers looking at slides of ancient sculptures in a dark lecture hall, all of them missing arms or noses or ears, and suddenly recognizing them for what they were: fellow amputees. “We were, as a class, all calling these works monumental, beautiful, and important, but we’d never seen them whole,” he says. Time’s effect on these marble bodies—their suffering, really—was understood as part of the art. Medicine didn’t think about bodies this way, Miller realized. Embedded in words like “disability” and “rehabilitation” was a less generous view: “There was an aberrant moment in your life and, with some help, you could get back to what you were, or approximately.
The question that was unsettling me was about regret: How sure was everyone that Sloan didn’t have desires he would have liked to express or anguish he would have liked to work through—and should someone have helped him express and work through them, instead of just letting him play video games and fart around with his friends? My real question, I guess, was: Is this all there is? Later, when I admitted this to Miller, he told me he understood this kind of anxiety well, but was able, with practice, to resist it. “Learning to love not knowing,” he said. “That’s a key part of this story.

Neanderthals Were People, Too | 2017 |
Joachim Neander was a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and work. There was no room in his worldview for randomness, only purpose and praise. “See how God this rolling globe / swathes with beauty as a robe,” one of his verses goes. “Forests, fields, and living things / each its Master’s glory sings.” He wrote dozens of hymns like this—awestruck and simplistic.

King named the new species after the valley where it was found, which itself had been named for the ecstatic poet who’d once wandered it. He called it Homo neanderthalensis: Neanderthal Man.

So, what if Busk—“a conscientious naturalist too cautious to make premature claims,” as Madison describes him—had beaten King to publication? Consider how different our first impressions of a Gibraltar Woman might have been from those of Neanderthal Man: what feelings of sympathy, or even kinship, this other skull might have stirred.

There is a worldview, the opposite of Joachim Neander’s, that sees our planet as a product of only tumult and indifference. In such a world, it’s possible for an entire species to be ground into extinction by forces beyond its control and then, 40,000 years later, be dug up and made to endure an additional century and a half of bad luck and abuse.

Neanderthals are people, too—a separate, shorn-off branch of our family tree. We last shared an ancestor at some point between 500,000 and 750,000 years ago. Then our evolutionary trajectory split. We evolved in Africa, while the Neanderthals would live in Europe and Asia for 300,000 years. Or as little as 60,000 years. Neanderthals built fires in that exact spot, on and off, for eight thousand years, he said—until their disappearance from Gibraltar.

“Look, you can almost see what’s happening,” Finlayson eventually said. “The fire and the charcoal, the embers scattering.” It was true. If you followed that stratum of sand away from the hearth, you could see, embedded in the wall behind us, black flecks where the smoke and cinders from this fire had blown. Suddenly, it struck me—though it should have earlier—that what we were looking at were the remnants of a single event: a specific fire, on a specific night, made by specific Neanderthals. Maybe this won’t sound that profound, but it snapped that prehistoric abstraction into focus. This wasn’t just a “hearth,” I realized; it was a campfire.

Another 18,000 years passed, give or take. The Phoenicians came. And they left offerings back here; there were shards of their ceramics under the catwalk we had just crossed. Then 2,000 years after that, in 1907, a certain Captain A. Gorham of Britain’s 2nd Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers arrived. Gorham didn’t discover Gorham’s Cave, Finlayson told me; it had always been impossible to miss. “That’s what he found,” Finlayson said. “That’s really Gorham’s Cave.” He pointed to the bedroom, and we both turned, bathing it with our headlamps. Beside the entrance was written, in big block letters, GORHAM’S CAVE 1907, with a chunky black arrow pointing to the doorway. Gorham had written his name directly over the spot where, some 39,000 years earlier, a Neanderthal had carved his or her own mark.

The full sweep and synchronicity of this history hadn’t seemed to occur to Finlayson before. Hesitantly, he said, “Maybe there are special places in the world that have universal human appeal.” I felt a similar, uncanny rush when I noticed that, at some point while he talked, we had each instinctually taken a seat on the rock ledge, next to the hashtag…It’s not an especially spiritual experience when one human being walks into another human being’s kitchen for the first time and correctly intuits where the silverware drawer is. At the back of Gorham’s, though, that same intuition was spread across two distinct kinds of humans and tens of thousands of years. Ultimately, why we are here and the Neanderthals are not can no longer be explained in a way that implies that our existence is particularly meaningful...

What would it have been like to look out over a grassy plain and watch parallel humanity pass by? Scientists often turn to historical first contacts as frames of reference, like the arrival of Europeans among Native Americans, or Captain Cook landing in Australia—largely histories of violence and subjugation. But as Zilhão points out, typically one of those two cultures set out to conquer the other. “Those people were conscious that they’d come from somewhere else,” he told me. “They were a product of a civilization that had books, that had studied their past.” Homo sapiens encountering Neanderthals would have been different: They met uncoupled from politics and history; neither identified as part of a network of millions of supposedly more advanced people. And so, as Finlayson put it to me: “Each valley could have told a different story. In one, they may have hit each other over the head. In another, they may have made love. In another, they ignored each other.”

Now, eating lunch alongside the two parallel, incommunicative clusters of archaeology students, I considered that the co-occurrence of humans and Neanderthals hadn’t been so trippy or profound after all. Maybe it looked as mundane as this: Two groups, lingering on a beach, only sort of acknowledging each other. Maybe the many millennia during which we shared Eurasia was like a super-long elevator ride with strangers.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essay about Paradise & the Camp Fire was really, really well done & very accurate to either my own experience or others’ I’ve heard firsthand. What a nightmare.

My other favs: the essay about the matador, the one about the killing of monk seals in Hawaii, and the one about the former prisoners who pick newly released prisoners up and help them adjust to the world and land on their feet.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars. Jon Mooallem brings a tremendous empathy to each of his subjects here, ion a way that feels more palpable than I am used to. And yet, it doesn't feel overbearing and predetermined in most cases.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays by author Jon Mooallem is a compliation of pieces he has written for The New York Times Magazine. They cover a wide variety of topics, from a Zen hospice center in San Franciscto to a rebel monkey eluding the authorities in Tampa.

Mooallem's writing is wonderful, and even the essays covering topics I wasn't particularly interested in were still engaging enough for me to keep reading.

Among the ones I found most gripping, however, included a detailed analysis of why, even though Paradise, CA was one of the best fire-prepared communities in the state, 85 people still lost their lives when the Camp Fire overwhelmed the town.

Mooallem's personal tale of participating in the harrowing, Alaskan-wilderness rescue of an injured friend was also impossible to put down. His consideration of how his own outsized fear of bears and the hypervigilance it prompted in him during the fateful hike may have contributed to their survival reminded me of how traits that seem neurotic in modern day life may actually be enormously useful when civilization is stripped away.

There are many nuggets of insight sprinkled throughout this collection, from considering how various people's reactions to the rebel monkey might point to a way for compromise in our fractured society to considering, in his essay about a man who built a Ponzi scheme around pigeon breeding, that some perplexing situations will never yeild satisfying answers.

Whatever his topic, Mooallem is a thoughtful and masterful prose stylist whose work is a genuine pleasure to read.

[Petra - Online but emotionally in airplane mode · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays that moves from hospice care and wildfires to small communities, private preoccupations, and public events. It follows people as they try to understand what is happening to them. It shows how situations resist explanation in moments of danger, loss, or attention, and how people still make meaning from them even without clear answers.

To say more about individual essays would risk reducing them, since each one builds through accumulation rather than revelation. The writing presents scenes in short passages and often turns back on itself, questioning its own account and avoiding firm conclusions. There is a pattern in the book of an event as a stone dropped in still water, with ripples moving outward and also inward to the depths where the stone was dropped, into the limits of understanding, with no final resolution.

The book feels collaborative. The author shows different angles that shape and reshape the same event and the reader, certain at first as to what is happening starts to see there are other ways, not at first considered, of interpreting the events. It's a very clever and well-written book. I'm generally not an essay person, but I'm glad I read this one.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this amazing collection of essays and articles. Jon Mooallem has such a unique approach to his subjects, a way of going out in the world and engaging people with an open mind, then synthesizing it into a vivid description of the experience while also making me think about the big picture of the world, of life, of humanity. He captures people, places, communities, and ideas in new and surprising ways.

My favorite pieces in this book are the first two: one about people dying and one about someone almost dying, under very different circumstances. I read them in my tent on the north rim of Grand Canyon while listening to a strong wind blow through a tall pine directly above me and wondering if it might fall...but not worrying too much because these pieces reinforce how life is both random and always hurtling toward some end.

Well, to be precise, I was rereading them, because all of these were previously published in the New York Times magazine. Perhaps you've enjoyed Jon's work there before. You'd probably remember the satisfaction of reading one of his articles even if you don't remember his name. I highly recommend reading this collection and remembering his name.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good writer with whom I was previously unfamiliar. Some great essays here -- the one on the Camp Fire in Paradise, CA was riveting -- i'm (obviously) not in it but felt quite panicky reading about some of the rescues. Excellent pieces also on a Spanish bullfighter he learned about at random b/c they look alike, a program in which ex-prisoners help those who get out after them to re-acclimate to society (terrific eye for detail in describing what strikes them as odd/unsettling after being out of society for a long time) and especially on a terrible accident in which a tree fell on one of his partners in a wilderness adventure in Alaska.

Not 5 stars for me b/c too much of a mixed bag -- there were also boring (to me) and overly detailed reports on such things as a guy who became excited about clouds and wanted to get official recognition for what he and some followers perceived to be a new kind of cloud (different from cumulus, cumulonimbus, etc. etc.).

But given the structure of an essay collection, it was easy to skim the ones that didn't speak to me. Overall a fine read, and I'll keep my eye peeled for more by this author.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jon Mooallem, a writer for The New York Times, wrote a piece about Michael Stipe a few months ago in the NYT Magazine that was so great I photocopied (and mailed it!) to a few favorite R.E.M. fans and then started looking for anything else he had written. Luckily, he has this terrific compilation of essays from the magazine. Tales include a pigeon Ponzi scheme, a harrowing look at California wildfires and a lighthearted visit with the creator of the Cloud Appreciation Society (who wrote a book that students at my school use in science classes!) Highly recommend this book and/or seeking out his pieces in the NYT archives. (Not a subscriber? The San Francisco library offers 72 hour access to the Times! Google it!)

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC of this title.

I really enjoyed Jon Mooallem's previous book, This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together - it brought a humanity and a varied perspective to a real event. This is a fantastic collection of Mooallem's earlier pieces, along with a few new ones, and it brings the same great eye to the many subjects he covers.

[Dan Turkel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jon Mooallem's writing is thoughtful, entertaining, and lined with an earnestness and pathos that differentiate it from some of the more "terminally online" feature writing that's so hot right now. Standouts include "A House at the End of the World" about a remarkable hospice, "Why These Instead of Others" about an Alaskan trip gone wrong, "This Is My Serious Face" about the author discovering that he shares a face with a famous (and infamously ugly) bullfighter, and "We Have Fire Everywhere" about the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. The Charlie Kaufman profile is on the weaker end, but none are bad.

[Bess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection of essays. In his introduction, Mooallem says, “I’d been puzzling over myself, torturously trying to unlock the truth of who I was. The truth is, I am the puzzling.” I love this. It strikes me as very Montaignian. It was rewarding to watch as Mooallem puzzles meaning into not just himself but his wide range of topics, from recently released convicts, wild rhesus monkeys in Florida, and his own doppelganger, to Neanderthals, Hawaiian monk seals, and a pigeon-breeding Ponzi scheme. Each essay becomes more than its topic, a satisfying puzzling for broader insight and meaning.

[BookBrowse · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Serious Face, journalist and author Jon Mooallem compiles essays he's published elsewhere over the past decade. While there's no central topic, the pieces converge in the questions they ask about resilience, community and the pursuit of dreams. Whether he's writing about a rogue monkey, a long-dead matador or wildfires, the author brings his vast curiosity and humility to each one.
-Erin Lyndal Martin

Read the full review at:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/review...

[Nadine K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Snappy, funny, engaging writing with a lot of heart that really resonated with me. If I had to describe Jon Mooallem's writing in one word it would be earnest. He has the ability to extract meaning from mundanity in a really lovely way. The endings of his essays are always fantastic.

My one gripe with this collection is that I think it's structured in a way that all the best essays are concentrated to the front of the book resulting in an ending of weaker essays.

My personal favorite essay was "My Serious Face" coz it was so genuinely funny and made me laugh out loud several times.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jon Mooallem is a fantastic writer. As with all essay collections I connected with some more than others, but overall found this book enjoyable and well worth my time. The essays covered a wide range of topics. My favorites were about a palliative care doctor, a bull fighter who looked remarkably similar to the author, a monkey on the run in Florida, a pigeon pyramid scheme and the history of neanderthal research...as I said, lots of variety. There's something for everyone here.

[Sol · Rating 2 out of 5]

The thing I struggled the most with Jon Mooallem's book "Serious Face: Essays" , was the fact that a lot of the essays didn't really connect or flow every well. The view of all these supposedly inspirational and supposed to alter your way of viewing the world, essays was incredibly pessimistic. I could not find myself relating to anything in the book and struggled through wanting to finish it. Though there were some moments that caught my attention overall was not a huge fan.

[Robert Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful Read

The essays in this book were fascinating. I had trouble pulling myself away from them because I just had to know what happened next. Maybe the best part of the book was what I learned from each varied essay. The topics ranged from Ponzi schemes to Neanderthals to facial structure, each more interesting than the last. Highly recommended.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, this was an overall 3.5, but with a few real standouts— the wildfire piece, the Neanderthal piece, and the last essay in the collection, a pandemic piece nominally about a trip to Spokane and a minor-league baseball game, but also about luck and chance and the guilt and anxiety that comes with the dread knowledge that we have collectively failed to save the future of the planet.

[LYDIA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never read Jon Mooallem’s work before, but this collection of essays is wonderful.

The topics vary from one woman's escape from the Paradise fire to a feral macaque monkey in central Florida.

Enjoy!

A complimentary ARC of this novel was provided by a giveaway on Goodreads. This is my honest review. Opinions are mine alone and not biased in any way.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite five star entries in this collection of a dozen or so entries:
A House at the End of the World
Can you even believe this is happening (A Monk Seal Murder Mystery)
We have fire everywhere
Swing State

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is magnificent. I stayed up way too late wanting to finish an essay and woke up thinking about what I’d read the night before. That is not typical for me and speaks to the power of these words. In particular the essay about the Camp fire was haunting. Excellent!