A posthumous book of essays by Doyle, who invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of the everyday. The author passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer.
If you are in love with language, here is how you will read Brian Doyle’s posthumous collection of essays: by underlining sentences and double-underlining other sentences; by sometimes shading in the space between the two sets of lines so as to create a kind of D.I.Y. bolded font; by marking whole astonishing paragraphs with a squiggly line in the margin, and by highlighting many of those squiggle-marked sections with a star to identify the best of the astonishing lines therein ... This book is what Van Zandt’s greatest hits would look like had he lived to be 60, and if every song on the record hit the bar set by Pancho and Lefty ... God’s acolyte is Doyle himself, missing not a single gorgeous blessing in a life so full of love it spilled over into essay after essay after essay ... Doyle was also both hilarious and fierce, and I took as much pleasure from watching him address a denizen of the gun-rights coalition as 'dear outraged shrieking lunatic,' as I took from lingering over the loveliest descriptions of the natural world I have ever read ... arguably a two-page master class in environmental writing. It also offers a fit description of the experience of reading this remarkable book: 'a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.'
... dazzling ... a renewed opportunity for more readers to discover the insight and humanity of [Doyle's] work ... bursts with vivid descriptions ... Doyle's brand of theology will appeal to fans of the work of writers like Anne Lamott ... Spirituality aside, readers fortunate enough to discover the many pleasures of Brian Doyle's work here will be grateful, too, for that encounter.
Creating a book from a stack of essays requires the mosaic artistry of a stained glass window. The editors select a piece that is full of light and rich in color, maybe a small story about a post office clerk. They shape it, smooth its edges, and choose its place next to another luminous story, maybe about free beer. And so it goes, one brilliant cobalt or ruby pane after another; maybe this next is a story about the smell of low tide. Finally, all the small pieces—each a beautiful, true thing in itself—together create a larger picture that is true in an entirely new and astonishing way. What truth is revealed when the light shines through the collected essays of Brian Doyle? Maybe this: You might think that your days are unremarkable. You would be wrong. Each day is full of wild and wonderful gifts ... Combined in One Long River of Song, Brian’s glowing essays create a vision of what a good person might be, what a good life surely is, a larger story of the transformative power of joyful gratitude.
