Schulz’s mind flows beautifully on the page. While this book is classified as a memoir, it can also be read as a sweeping set of essays. Schulz’s prose is lucid and intentional, yet unexpected and compassionate. She doesn’t race to make her point and that expansive pace is what makes this book such a pleasure. Hers is a nimble and profoundly humane mind, capable of carrying the various threads of her thinking onward without losing the integrity of the fabric she’s creating ... Schulz uses her life’s stories as a launching point for an omnivore’s exploration of science, space, history, art, and writing in order to elaborate her points. Rather than dwell on her personal life, weighing the reader down with the operatic twists of some memoirs, Schulz treads lightly on the drama of her days. She’s not writing for her own personal catharsis ... While this memoir is no quest for healing or a chronicle of family secrets, there is great weight in Schulz’s most personal moments. Being privy to her budding romance is a window into intense tenderness and deep gratitude ... Where other memoirs concentrate on facts and family history, Schulz finds a way to subvert the genre, taking it to philosophical levels while maintaining a grounded intimacy.
More than any book in recent memory, Lost & Found evokes the process of falling in love with a lush expansiveness and alertness to detail, a perfect ballet of confession and philosophy. Schulz plaits her personal narrative with canonical explorations, from Plato to Dante to Elizabeth Bishop. Hers is a generous, conversational voice; the effect is like an intoxicating Oxbridge tutorial. This richly discursive style conjures a marriage of minds, between an atheist Jewish sophisticate and a rural-centric, theologically attuned Christian ... Lost & Found concludes on a jubilant note, an unabashed ode to joy.
Eloquent ... While Schulz writes with tenderness and honesty about love, her sharpest and most moving passages are about loss ... Schulz lost her father, but by the end of Lost & Found, we understand that while his absence is devastating, shocking and total, she will continue to find gifts he left for her. He’s still there in her verve and curiosity, in her cleareyed ability not just to write about love, but to love.
Luminescent ... [A] deft, roving and elegantly written work ... [Schultz] has...an incredible capacity to make everything pertinent ... Schulz begins with the specificity of her own experience, but the book soon becomes a discussion of the broader, existential reckoning we each must make with impermanence, both of our own existence, and that of the people we love ... Cynics might find the garrulousness with which she waxes lyrical about her adoration of C a tad overearnest. But rarely do we encounter writing that originates from such a firm bedrock of love and happiness as that described in Lost & Found ... Through it all, though, Schulz is attuned to the extraordinary in the ordinary ... Lost & Found is itself a marvel of a meditation. It left me moved, inspired and ultimately elated.
Schulz’s prose is not so much purple as lavender ... intellectual appetite...pulses through these pages ... Sometimes old-fashioned in her syntax, using phrases like 'set about' and 'I suppose,' Schulz likes to turn parts of speech over and examine them, like stones ... a model of effective eulogy ... Against such a colorful character [as the writer's deceased father], made more vivid by his absence, others can’t help fading. Schulz strains to describe the state of bereavement, whose scudding emotions are presented as curious novelties but will be familiar to anyone who’s been there ... More radically, Schulz’s book torques the grief memoir into a Möbius strip, placing the totalizing experience of loss...on a continuum with the summons of romantic and even religious love ... The couple’s love story can have the earnest, burbling quality of a wedding journal ... If you can tolerate a little schmaltz, though, stick with Schulz ... In an ocean of churning cynicism and despair, this is a winning bet.
... extraordinary ... It’s like taking a stroll with a highly erudite guide, but one with a piercing urgency in their voice. Lost & Found is both philosophical and profoundly personal, unflinching in its efforts to capture the whole truth about grief and loss, the banal and embarrassing as well as the drama: the sudden physical clumsiness, the unexplained toothache, the unexpected irritability. Schulz’s reflections and insights often feel like the articulation of something dimly glimpsed and rarely acknowledged, but they spring out of what is, essentially, the story of a family bound by deep bonds of love ... a profound and beautiful book. It’s a moving meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy, wonder and the miracle of love. It’s witty, wise, beautifully structured and written in clear, singing prose. Oh, and just wait till you hear what happened to that falling star.
... the narrative truly comes alive when [Schulz] contemplates her father’s story ... The book’s second section describes Schulz’s surprise at finding a life partner after years of cherishing a bookish kind of solitude. Here, her tendency to digress might be seen as a defence against cloying sentimentality. If so, she needn’t have worried ... But Schulz’s unusual method – part‑essay, part-memoir – comes into its own in the book’s final third ... In these passages, Schulz’s prose almost rises to the level of Nietzsche at his most wise and humane, or William James.
... [a] lyrical and deeply thoughtful memoir ... As Schulz begins her intensely logical analysis...the reader might be tempted to wonder if the author’s riff into these abstractions is simply its own kind of evasiveness—another way of looking away rather than reading the words in the pocket filled with grief. But Schulz’s intellectual meditation on the language of loss is not an effort to pivot away from pain. Instead, it is an effort to open grief up to a larger and deeper kind of engagement ... Schulz finds a series of deeply touching ways to honor and celebrate both the conjunction and continuity that her entwined experiences of losing and finding love have shown her ... This gorgeous memoir is heartbreaking and restorative all at once.
An eloquent meditation ... This probing, multifaceted exploration of two universal phenomena—grief and love—is both a revealing account of defining moments in Schulz’s life and an eloquent map of the pathways connecting them to our shared human experience ... The poignancy of these reminiscences is more than balanced by the exuberant account of Schulz’s love affair with C. ... The affectionately candid story of their instantaneous attachment and deepening relationship allows Schulz to probe some of the ineffable mysteries of human attraction and ponder the wild improbability that two people ever find each other and fall in love ... Discoursing knowledgeably and often with good humor on subjects that include etymology, poetry, natural history, psychology and more, Schulz displays a capacious intelligence matched only by her boundless curiosity and insight. Lost & Found is a beautiful, life-affirming book that passionately embraces some of the deepest questions of human existence in the fullness of their sorrow and joy.
... a testament to [Schulz's] ability to examine the nuances of loss, grief and recovery — if there is such a word in this context — with an honest, unflinching eye ... Schulz — a Pulitzer winner — is gifted with a prose that leaves its mark with the lightest of touches. It is the radiance of her language that renders even her etymological explorations of loss tender ... This incandescence is not a technique of embellishment. There is, in fact, no need for cosmetic varnishing because Schulz’s narrative cadence is matched by the depth of her philosophical interrogation of grief and its attendant ritual ... Where Schulz is most effective, devastatingly so, is in her ability to flesh out words to convey those experiences peculiar to bereavement which, usually, defy language.
Lost & Found is as much a philosophical reckoning with the experiences of losing and finding as it is a record of Schulz's personal grief and love stories. It is that philosophical turning over of loss and discovery that makes this memoir extraordinary, for it unlocks existential meaning out of the utterly mundane facts of human life ... That Schulz can make a visit to the Oxford English Dictionary...compelling—surprising yet apt—is a testament to her capabilities as a prose stylist ... passages, where we learn about the person Isaac was...are rendered lovingly, making us miss him too. What makes the first section of this memoir piercing, though...is that beyond an affecting portrait of singular mourning, Schulz unravels universal truths about why loss guts us, and how it forces us to grapple with our place in the world and its workings ... Occasionally, all that awe grows tiresome, as when Schulz belabors her wonderment over the odds of chancing upon her partner ... Lost & Found is a prod toward amazement, a call to remember that 'we are here to keep watch, not to keep.'
Lost & Found is a straightforward, elegantly written tribute to her father, Isaac Schulz ... The second half of the book is a passionate paean to her New Yorker colleague Casey Cep, whom she met and fell madly in love with 18 months before her beloved father died ... [William] James is one of many writers, thinkers and poets, including Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman, whose words amplify Schulz’s own often dazzling reflections on loss, discovery and the continuity of life. Toward the end of the book, however, she resumes her contrarian stance, challenging Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina—'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'—to ask why family stories of joy and contentment such as her own are necessarily dull.
With quotations from a vast mine of sources --- including Roman mythology, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Plato and James Baldwin, to name just a few --- Schulz keeps her readers awake and alert to each small turn in this artfully grounded story ... It would be tough to find another book that so effectively combines the panoply of emotions examined here or that leaves the reader with such a sense of quiet comfort and natural, human connectedness.
... a charming and relatable portrait ... Schulz collects profound insights into love, how relationships develop and grow, and the new things we continue to find in loved ones, even after they’re gone ... Overall, the narrative is somewhat philosophical and perhaps a little cerebral, as it discusses loss and seeking, but it’s full of curiosity and a great deal of love and compassion that readers will relish. Recommended for most libraries and an excellent book club selection.
... lovely ... Her deeply felt memoir, though, is more than a reflection on the loss of a parent. It is about the idea of loss in general...and the passage of time ... But we also find things, and Schulz considers that in fresh and evocative ways as well. The genius of Lost & Found is in its quotidian nature ... Schulz is a wonderful writer, poetic and profound, and Lost & Found is a poignant, loving, wise, and comforting meditation on grief from both a personal and collective perspective.
... stunning ... She explores the grief of loss and joy of finding through penetrating reflections ... exquisite existential wanderings ... Schulz’s canny observations are a treasure
Elegant and thought-provoking, Schulz’s book is as much a celebration of the circle of life as it is an elegant reminder to all that 'we are here to keep watch, not to keep.' A searchingly intelligent memoir and psychological meditation.
