Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

Journalist Paterniti (The Telling Room) is a frequent contributor to Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine, and it was in those heavyweight publications that these 17 essays originally saw print. The author is a practitioner of "longform" journalism, a style that is essentially just "new journalism" rebranded for an audience who prefers information served in 140-character portions. There are several reasons why Paterniti's editors give him the freedom to weave his yarns at great length; for one, he's possessed of the rare ability to craft long sentences that don't run-on. And his narratives are vehicles for rich, visual descriptions; his writing has an almost-cinematic quality that guides the reader's mental camera effortlessly through his characters' physical and psychological landscapes. Paterniti identifies closely with his subjects—often to one specific person to whom he has become attached—and they in turn kindle the obsessions that drive his journalism. Although a subtle humor abounds, Paterniti shows his greatest strength in his depictions of tragedy, as he investigates a terrible plane crash, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and a bridge in China that is popular for suicides. Here, he dramatizes his reporting while avoiding melodrama and, somehow, conveys the terrible, angry grief that is awakened by loss.