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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fatally flawed, otherwise fun and lively, September 13, 2008
This review is from: For the Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing (Hardcover)
I'm reading, enjoying, thinking of the many people I can give this book to as a gift to encourage us to keep writing our letters. The obvious recipients would be people who already do some letter-writing: my niece, sisters, grandma, my aunt in Oregon. It's young and lively, and the author has a breezy and charming voice.
Sadly, my plans were quickly dashed. The first chapter, "Letters as Gifts," is comprised of two parts, each with their own sections: "love letters" and "erotic letters." So you get all the way to page 17 of this book and you get the author's fabricated example of a letter to a lover: "I found it slightly (just slightly) more pleasurable when we switched places and you were on top, leaning back to play with my p**** while kneeling over me and letting me suck on your sweetness ..."
Huh. It's like being at a bus stop and having a muttering stranger dump unwanted revelations on you. If O'Shea had waited until we knew her, trusted her, saw how she likes to pull the shocking tricks of youth, it might have worked. Or perhaps as an appendix, with a disclaimer. But coming in the first 20 pages (so to speak), it was a nasty rather than naughty surprise. Cancel those book orders for mom, grandma, and aunt, please! Niece can still have one, but my Christian sister in Texas? I think not.
This is one to give to college students, and that's about it. Maybe that's good enough, but I can't help thinking of a local coffee shop run by a young man with a trust fund. It had madly painted walls and a cool music soundtrack, and surly teens sitting around on couches. When I went to the counter and asked for a cup of decaf, the young owner snarled, "We don't serve DECAF here." Right-o, I get it, I am not hip enough to be your customer. Coffee shop: out of business within the year, when the trust fund money ran out. Moral: don't insult your customer base if you want to actually reach people, unless you are positioning your work as For Young Hotties Only.
Chapter 4 is Letters of Gratitude, but you have to wait until page 83. With the optimism of youth, the author appears to think she'll be writing more erotic letters than grateful ones. Maybe in your 20's, dear, but the fantasies of hot-n-steamy through the U.S. Postal Service are, I believe, rather exaggerated.
At the very least, etiquette demands that if you're going to eat it in front of everybody, better make sure you bring enough for the whole class.
Otherwise, O'Shea has interesting things to say, did great research, and writes fresh and personal sentences with cohesion and grace. You could just staple that one section together and let Aunt Sue pry it open as a guilty secret when you let her look at your copy!
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
smart and helpful, June 18, 2007
This review is from: For the Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing (Hardcover)
This is the kind of book that can surprise you by the depth and canniness of insight offered into a topic, in this case, letter writing. It offers spot-on insight into how letters work, why they work, why we react how we do to them, and the underlying architecture of etiquette that makes up the art. If all that sounds dry, it's really not dry in the book.
The attention to the detail of writing good letters is evident in the advice for each main type of letter (including for instance how to write thoughtful and appropriate closings to letters) and how and when to send letters (email vs. mail, courier (calling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), fax, etc) for maximum impact.
The book finds a rare harmonious compromise between professional and personal, between academic and emotional, funny and serious, between style and substance. It's written in bite-sized digestible chapters which makes it easy to pick up and put down. I found it to be a very pleasurable read. I know I'll never write letters the same way again.
I believe this would make a good gift for a recent college grad or just someone you happen to share a love of letters with. When you think of all the great letter-writing companions over time, they gained their appreciation for letter-writing at some point.... why not pass that passion on to someone, or kindle it in someone new?
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Infectious Love of Letters, July 21, 2007
This review is from: For the Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing (Hardcover)
Don't let this book's appearance fool you. For the Love of Letters may look like yet another anthology of famous letters, but it has much, much more to offer. Yes, you'll find letters from the likes of Keats, Poe, Beethoven, and many others, but these letters serve only to illuminate O'Shea's fresh, funny take on a smart, ambitious single woman's journey through the dating scene, job searches, and beyond.
O'Shea begins by announcing her thesis--"Yes, There's Still a Need for Letters"--and then launches into a pithy discussion of how the Internet age has both reinvigorated and altered the art of letter writing. She worries that "what we gain in speed" through email and text messages, "we lose in language" and sets out to rectify this problem. Although we may enjoy the convenience of electronic correspondence, we must not forget that "English is curvaceous, complex, and beautiful," for, if we do so, we "squander our inheritance."
The early chapters treat the author's forte, the love letter. The intro features a reference to Rostand's Cyrano, a role O'Shea plays with great panache here and on her website, letterlover.net, which provides letters for lovelorn. She covers the importance of timing, word choice, and even grammar in a love letter, providing examples from her own and others' correspondence. O'Shea's own very direct, honest, and emotional letters propel the early chapters of the book. The reader experiences the potentially embarrassing and starkly self-revelatory "crush confession," for which O'Shea advises "self-discipline" but can't resist taking her preferred "no-holds-barred" approach to expressing her feelings. And that's the great strength of this book: O'Shea's willingness to expose herself for the better or worse. We feel the unbridled sensuality of her erotic letters, the tumult of break-up letters, and the great sorrow of a condolence letter written to the grieving mother of deceased young friend. Of special note is O'Shea's embarrassing exchange with a former lover whose intentions are good--he writes to apologize--but whose memory isn't: he gets her name wrong!
In the book's later chapters, O'Shea moves on to less personal kinds of correspondence, such as recommendation and cover letters. While I prefer the early chapters--and I suspect that O'Shea does, too--these sections have much to offer. She provides the best advice I've seen for writing letters of recommendation and offers examples from Collier's Cyclopedia of Commercial and Social Information to support her assertions. And another perspective on the dreaded "cover letter" is always welcome.
Booksellers should display For the Love of Letters alongside Sex and the City and the so-called "chick-lit" novels (I've always found this label condescending; but, in lieu of a better term, I employ it here for communication purposes). I recommend this book very highly to fans of such works. However, although I have little interest in the chick-lit genre, I still thoroughly enjoyed Love of Letters. O'Shea's candor and charming persona distinguish the text, and her belief in the vitality of the personal letter in the Internet age is infectious.
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