Product Details
Between Panic and Desire (American Lives)

Between Panic and Desire (American Lives)
By Dinty W. Moore

List Price: $24.95
Price: $18.21 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

38 new or used available from $8.00

Average customer review:

Product Description

“Insouciant” and “irreverent” are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore’s books—and, invariably, “hilarious.” Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, “A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own.
 
Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author’s early life—the Kennedy assassination, Nixon’s resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few—shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today’s world for all of us who spent our formative years in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms—a coroner’s report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan—aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.
(20071210)

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #456795 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-03-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 161 pages

Features

  • ISBN13: 9780803211490
  • BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this unconventional, nonsequential, generational autobiography, AKA cultural memoir, Moore, a professor of English at Ohio University, describes growing up as a child of the 1950s. Panic characterized his youth, as he watched the symbols of safety and security on television—Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best—while his real world fell apart. His mother had left his often-inebriated father, but couldn't handle raising the children herself. Paranoia was the theme of his teen years, as JFK and King were assassinated; the draft and the Vietnam War drove young men to extremes; and characters like Charlie Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr. all took aim at public figures. Moore's own paranoia was only heightened by using LSD and smoking dope while tooling around in his VW Beetle. Miraculously, desire began to overtake panic; he discovered a passion for writing, which has focused him ever since. Moore lays all this out in a series of free-form, almost playful essays; only there's something serious here, too, as he realizes our history seems to repeat itself: the Patriot Act sounds like 1984 and Iraq feels like Vietnam all over again. In the end, Moore (The Accidental Buddhist) takes readers on a quirky, entertaining joyride. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"[A] quirky, entertaining joyride."-Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly 20080315)

"Moore forges a brisk, incisive, funny, sometimes silly, yet stealthily affecting memoir in essays and skits, a `generational autobiography,' and good candid guy stuff. . . . Each anecdote, piece of pop-culture trivia, and frankly confessed panic and desire yields a chunk of irony and a sliver of wisdom."-Donna Seaman, Booklist (Donna Seaman Booklist 20080301)

"The writing is frequently very funny; insightful, too, especially Moore's belief that humans are generally delusional when it comes to their expectations vs. what is realistically possible. . . . The narrative has its poignant moments, particularly in Moore's recollections of his father. And despite his fractured take on the world, his message is essentially hopeful. Moore, it seems, is moving on."-Robert Kelly, Library Journal (Robert Kelly Library Journal 20080302)

"Between Panic and Desire is more autopsy than memoir-a strange new hybrid. It''s a fantasy of letting go of the things that have haunted Moore his entire life. These things do, in fact, float off the pages."-Los Angeles Times (Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times 20080228)

"Between Panic and Desire turns the memoir genre on its head as it deftly moves from essay to essay."-Peter Grandbois, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Peter Grandbois Review of Contemporary Fiction )

"This book is funny, funny, funny. It is an unconventional-some might say, experimental-collection of frolicsome and touching personal essays. . . . [T]he book is a rare example of how unusual form actually helps. It is the ideal display for Dinty's imagination. He daydreams. He fantasizes. He hallucinates. And this is nonfiction. For anyone who thinks the genre is nothing more than a retelling of facts, pick up a copy of Between Panic and Desire. . . . It is literary nonfiction with integrity. And it's fun."-Oxford Town (Neil White Oxford Town )

About the Author

Dinty W. Moore is a professor of English at Ohio University and the author of several books, including The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still.

Customer Reviews

Quirky, honest and delightful4
This really isn't a memoir in the conventional sense--and thank God for that. This sad-yet-funny montage provides a number of poignant glimpses into the life of a writer and a country: whether he's writing about Irish-Americana, 9/11, dropping acid, or dysfunctional fathers, Dinty Moore is poignant, honest and ultimately hopeful. No matter how much you think your country is screwed up, or how much you think you've screwed up, or how much you think your family screwed you up, read Panic and Desire. By the time you finish it you'll realize life is better than you thought.

Moore's writing will inform and open your heart while you think you're just being delighted and amused by a great story.5
Moore, the master of literary nonfiction, brings the reader into the moments that make up a life (a memoir) and explodes the meaning of them from the inside out allowing readers to glimpse reflections of their own lives refracted in the shattered glimmering fallout of a story (structured in experiential, experimental segments) well told.

Turning Memoir On Its Side...5
Dinty W. Moore has written a completely unexpected memoir. This series of linked essays (with a quiz thrown in here and there for good measure) follows the path of a single life through the cultural touchstones that that shaped all of us who are old enough to remember Nixon, Squeaky Fromme, and Mr. Greenjeans.

If you're not old enough to remember them, buy this for your father and write something on the inside flap like, "Thanks for not sending me hither and yon looking for a father figure, Dad!" Trust me. Next time you call home for money, you'll be glad that you did.