We were quite delighted with the buoyancy and the imagination demonstrated by Brian Doyle as the editor of God Is Love: Essays from Portland Magazine. He displays the same qualities in this new stunningly written collection of essays. He describes them as "resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men." Many of them were first published in The American Scholar. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Christian Century, Commonweal, and America.
Doyle has a lively appreciation for storytelling and the amazing diversity of human creativity. The gifted individuals he has chosen to lionize are "men of immense spiritual substance, prayerful fury, enormous grace, wonderful attentiveness to miracle; in other words, devout men, in the most real and serious and smiling sense." Here you will find dazzling essays on the special talents of William Blake, the questing spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson, the moral fiber of Plutarch, the musical grace notes of Van Morrison, the sacramental works of James Joyce, the legacies of the late great sax player Paul Desmond who wrote "Take Five" for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the soul-stirring novels of Graham Greene, and others. In this age of severe criticism and flaming on the net, it is such a pleasure to savor essays that pay tribute to the holy creative works of men who made their mark upon their time by being true to themselves.
