Jon Mooallem's Books

Serious Face

Essays

By: Jon Mooallem

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From the discovery of the author’s face in a century-old photograph to a triple-amputee hospice director working at the border of life and death, here are thirteen hopeful, heartbreaking, and profound essays from “one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors working today” (Elizabeth Gilbert). ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Lit Hub Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from California’s deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and more—all with a deep conviction that it’s our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us. Mooallem’s powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing “as much art as it is journalism,” and Jia Tolentino has praised his “grace and command.” In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?

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Page Count

321

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525509941

ISBN 13

9780525509943

Wild Ones

A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

By: Jon Mooallem

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Wild Ones

A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

By: Jon Mooallem

Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without that easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, [Jon] Mooallem merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring life into, a broken world."--Back cover.

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Page Count

353

Publisher

Penguin Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143125370

ISBN 13

9780143125372

This Is Chance!

The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together

By: Jon Mooallem

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This Is Chance!

The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together

By: Jon Mooallem

The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster—and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together “A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism.”—The Wall Street Journal “A beautifully wrought and profoundly joyful story of compassion and perseverance.”—BuzzFeed (Best Books of the Year) In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis—the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world. Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman’s voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. Genie Chance was a part-time radio reporter and working mother who would play an unlikely role in the wake of the disaster, helping to put her fractured community back together. Her tireless broadcasts over the next three days would transform her into a legendary figure in Alaska and bring her fame worldwide—but only briefly. That Easter weekend in Anchorage, Genie and a cast of endearingly eccentric characters—from a mountaineering psychologist to the local community theater group staging Our Town—were thrown into a jumbled world they could not recognize. Together, they would make a home in it again. Drawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance! is the hopeful, gorgeously told story of a single catastrophic weekend and proof of our collective strength in a turbulent world. There are moments when reality instantly changes—when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance. This Is Chance! is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic portrayal of one community rising above the randomness, a real-life fable of human connection withstanding chaos.

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Page Count

338

Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525509925

ISBN 13

9780525509929

This Is Chance!

The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together

By: Jon Mooallem

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This Is Chance!

The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together

By: Jon Mooallem

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Page Count

338

Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525509925

ISBN 13

9780525509929

Wild Ones

A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

By: Jon Mooallem

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Wild Ones

A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

By: Jon Mooallem

Intelligent and highly nuanced… This book may bring tears to your eyes." -- San Francisco Chronicle Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual world she’s inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

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Page Count

325

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101617845

ISBN 13

9781101617847

Serious Face

Essays

By: Jon Mooallem

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Serious Face

Essays

By: Jon Mooallem

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Page Count

321

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525509941

ISBN 13

9780525509943

Constant Touch

A Global History of the Mobile Phone

By: Jon Agar

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Constant Touch

A Global History of the Mobile Phone

By: Jon Agar

Mobile phones are a ubiquitous technology with a fascinating history. There are now as many mobile phones in the world as there are people. We carry them around with us wherever we go. And while we used to just speak into them, now mobiles are used to do all kinds of tasks, from talking to twittering, from playing a game to paying a bill. Jon Agar takes the mobile to pieces, tracing what makes it work, and puts it together again, showing how it was shaped in different national contexts in the United States, Europe, the Far East and Africa. He tells the story from the early associations with cars and the privileged, through its immense popular success, to the rise of the smartphone. Few scientific revolutions affect us in such a day-to-day way as the development of the mobile phone. Jon Agar's deft history explains exactly how this revolution has come about - and where it may lead in the future.

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Age

Page Count

263

Publisher

Icon Books Ltd

Published Date

ISBN 10

1848315260

ISBN 13

9781848315266

Book's by Jon Mooallem

Serious Face

Serious Face

Wild Ones

Wild Ones

This Is Chance!

This Is Chance!

This Is Chance!

This Is Chance!

Wild Ones

Wild Ones

Serious Face

Serious Face

Constant Touch

Constant Touch

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