Customer Reviews

Us: Americans Talk About Love

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found Us to be a surprising and compelling read on several levels. A number of publications have highlighted the particularly dramatic and counterintuitive love narratives Bowe includes in the book. As such, I assumed I would approach Us as a perusal, eyeing the intriguing introductory quotes that launch the 44 interviews before choosing what to read.

However I soon found myself pulled into the conceit that gives Us its organizational structure. In arranging chapters by the duration of the subject's love experience, Bowe implicitly asks us to consider how time shapes the meaning we assign to love. In reading the book, as I ultimately did, it in its printed order, I found myself wondering whether length matters in matters of the heart.

Bowe begins with a pre-schooler contemplating her weeks-old love for a boy who shares his toys with her. The book concludes with stories of couples who have endured the trials of time and reaped the unique benefits of a romantic love spanning fifty or more years. Between these extremes, Us introduces a set of experiences of varying lengths, each so remarkably diverse that one is left with the poet's question: Can the word love have shared meaning?

Through Bowe's tactful editing, the reader hears the voices of men and women facing the impossible task of putting language to such experience. The interviews are always surprising, especially when they reveal the ways love can bring out the most strikingly unloving behavior. Perhaps even more surprising, however, are the interviews that remind us love is not always surprising.

Bowe concludes, after years of interviewing and editing, that he is now more perplexed by love than when he took on the book. I reached the same conclusion. However he does suggest that one distinct theme emerging from this ambitious project. Namely, men and women who struggle to define and explain love in its early its early stages differ dramatically from those who talk about love in its maturity. If there is any lesson in this book--any benefit to hearing everyday voices on such a strongly-felt feeling--it must be found somewhere within this mysterious distinction.

Each story in this book is a little gem. Some are sad, some are happy -- all kinds of people speak, in an astonishing variety of voices which in some mysterious way build upon each other the more you read. I knew I was interested in the book but I didn't really anticipate it being such a page-turner -- I couldn't wait to get back to it and read the next story. And reading them, you really do get an ever-so-slightly clearer idea about what love is. This would make a good valentine's day present.

I so loved this book. It's like getting to see straight into the heart of America--or the many hearts of America, for one of its strengths is how very different and utterly compelling each one of the stories that are included here is. They're at times heartbreaking (the woman whose ill lover sent her away), other times astonishing for what they show about the depths of human strength and compassion humans (the same woman, whose new lover holds her while she cries), but together they renew your faith in life's vast possibility. I can't imagine anyone not liking this book, except for the black hearted or bitter.

I just have to add, I really don't get the sour remarks of the reviewer who took exception to the inclusion of a drunken street person in here. I kind of loved that the book has him--if you live in New York, you pass street people every day and never stop to think what they're thinking or feeling. The fact that the author does and included the feelings/thoughts was kind of genius--by doing this, he humanizes what to many people are inhuman. And the remark about how "one basic task that quotes should do in any story - prove the writer's point with the voices of the people he/she interview"--but the book wonderfully lets the subjects speak for themselves. That's one of the delightful things about it: it doesn't impose the writer's point of view. And finally no point to the book? Yeah, yeah, tell it to William James, who didn't particularly have one either in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," where he set out to explore how individuals themselves perceive their own religious experiences.

To say the book doesn't have a point is to overlook the fact that, taken together, the voices form a rich, beautiful fabric. And maybe that's the point.

I think everyone loves to hear stories about how so and so met, or how so and so stay together or not. As someone who went through blind dates and the other usual disappointments of 'finding love', I can read this from the comfort of having found 'it'. But I think this is a nice, witty, sometimes sad, sometimes funny collection of interviews- diving into the mystery of how things can work out, or not.

John Bowe has done us a service with this book - as well as we might think we know our fellow Americans, we have a lot to learn.

These are the sorts of stories that make one think twice when gazing surreptitiously at some odd couple on the subway or at the gas station. They make it much harder to forget that everyone we see, no matter how poorly they may appear to fit in the matrix of what we call normal, wants, needs or grapples with that thing we call love - just like us.

And with each character given free rein to share their own very idiosyncratic version of an experience virtually all of us share, this book dodges a trap. Bowe never suggests that he knows what love is, why it is, what makes it work or why it fails. He never privileges one kind of love over another. By arranging the tales according to the duration of the relationship, Bowe chooses the one metric that can be called truly objective. He doesn't try to line them up by their level of success or failure. He lets each stand on its own, unburdened by any ranking, assessment or judgment.

That decision on Bowe's part disappointed at least one reviewer here ("Mr Bowe does not use the voices of his interview subjects to enlighten us on the topic ....what can we really learn about love from their stories?"), but rather than being a weakness I think this ranks among the book's greatest strengths. The reading experience is uncluttered by Bowe's personality, or those of his many assistants. The reader is left free to decide what these stories tell us about love in general, or our own loves.

Readers seeking more direction can easily find it - the bookstores are full of tomes describing what love SHOULD be, or how it SHOULD work; I even remember a series of jelly jar glasses decorated with naked children that purported to be guides to love ("love is ... the greatest feeling you can feel!").

That's not what Bowe is offering. This book provides evidence - painstakingly extracted evidence - not an argument. The reader is left free to consider what this his or her own love affairs look like in the light of that evidence. Forty, sixty or a hundred years from now, when other, more prescriptive love-tomes have been rendered dated and obsolete, this book will serve its purpose just as well as it does today.

It may be the full moon, or karma, or the stars were lined up in the right order, but whatever the cause, it is a wonderful book to come out for Valentine's Day. Did Bowe or his publisher plan it that way? I hope so. My wife and I have read a few segments together, and enjoyed it every time. It helped define love for us, and what keeps people together for the long haul, or in the short run as the case may be. It is also a good book to read a few pages at a time, and then pick it up when times and schedules permit. For me, it was a page turner, and I often found myself skipping other reading because I wanted to read the next love story...A good book for contemplation and meditation about your personal future with your loved one. Read it together like we did.

As I was reading these stories, I found myself feeling thankful that John Bowe didn't edit like a bad referee. You know what a bad referee is? It happens in basketball, when the referee, who is supposed to be there to help maintain just enough order and fairness so that the players' talent decides the outcome, instead, gets in the way of the players and makes poor calls. Instead of the referee letting the players play, he gets in the way and ruins a perfectly good game.

A good referee, however, lets the players play! And a good editor/interviewer lets the person speak! John Bowe and his team of interviewers let the voice of the person come through in each fascinating interview, rather than mess it up by over-editing. It's refreshing to read the real voice of a person trying to share how he/she experiences love. The stories are raw and therefore, true to the person. Each story feels real, each person feels touchable, like a friend or somebody I know in my life.

As I read more and more I realized I'm not alone. Love is everywhere and nowhere, at the same time! We feel it and don't understand it. We need it, and fear it. We will move heaven and earth to experience it, and go through hell not to lose it. Every human emotion explodes in this book like a volcano erupting; hot, scorching, cooling as time goes on.

I recommend you read this book and reflect. Do you see yourself in any of these people? I did. Over and over. Sometimes that felt good, other times it felt bad. But never, did it feel numb. that's how I know it's human, it's alive!

In a lesser writer's hands, this book could have come off as schmaltzy as the latest romantic comedy movie-dreck that Hollywood pops out with alarmingly senseless regularity.

Instead, it's a vibrant portrait of love in its many shapes, sizes, colors... none of them simple, all of them real.

Skip the tired attempt at the movie theater and spend a night at home with this book. You'll be all the better for it. And after you've read it, at long last, you'll finally know the true historical culprit that drives us all to our best and to our worst: LOVE.

Buy it now!

Perry

After hearing John Bowe on NPR and reading a profile of him and this book in the NY Times, I had high expectations for this book. On NPR Bowe spoke eloquently and incisively about his own troubled experiences with love that led him to compile this book. If only his voice were present in the book's essays as opposed to those that are there. No new ground is broken, no revelations, not even a spark of insight. Just lots of dull, self-interested droning about some successful and some not-so-successful love affairs.

Ok. but not great. Taped interviews with people of different ages. Nothing new for me.