Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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LOUD AND CLEAR By Anna Quindlen
This is the most common sense I’ve heard or read in quite some time. In the midst of a deafening cacophony of supporters and detractors of President Bush and his policies, here is the voice of a mother of three who also happens to have occupied a front row seat to history as a columnist for the New York Times and Newsweek. If Michael Moore is speeding on one end of the spectrum and Sean Hannity on the other, Anna Quindlen feels like she’s driving the speed limit right in the middle where most of us live.
Loud and Clear is a collection of some of Quindlen’s most memorable essays from the last few years. She shares several columns on September 11th, including her thoughts on being about the work of a journalist on that day. “It cemented what I had always know about the business,” she says, “that it had the ability to make you better than you thought you could be because of the ordinary courage you saw at every turn.”
Quindlen talks as revealingly about the premature death of her mother as she does about gun violence and AIDS and her own children. She talks about loving the easy kicking-the-curb days of summer and the importance of letting our kids have downtime. “Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring. . . I don’t believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it. . .”
Read it all in one sitting or a chapter a day all summer, you will enjoy the powerful prose of Pulitzer Prize winning writer Anna Quindlen. Her latest bestseller in hardcover nonfiction is Loud and Clear. On the Book Beat for KSL Newsradio 1160, I’m Amanda Dickson.
