Read this book, just go buy it.

Some of you might be familiar with The Moth Radio Hour on random PBS stations.  If not, you should be. It's real people telling their real stories, out loud, brave and true.  This book, titled "THE MOTH" is a sort of compilation of some of those stories brought together for the first time in print. They have been sorted out, edited, but the really cool thing is that they are all true, all 50 of them, and the voice of the person telling the tale is there.  Even in print. 

These are stories that will make you laugh out loud and cry out loud. Stories that will scare you with their danger and remind you what hope is.  They are all over the map and only one or two are even remotely sentimental.  Sebastion Junger writes about the grim dirt of war.  Andrew Solomon writes about a sort of exorcism that involves a ram and some blood and maybe it drove the demons out of his head, he still isn't sure. Adam Gonick makes a fool of himself over an internet abbreviation.  The list of amazing writers goes on: Joyce Maynard, Ted Conover, Richard Price, Malcolm Gladwell and more writers that I have never read but now will.

All the stories are true and all were spoken out loud in one of the Moth Performance venues. Those venues happen all the time (well, maybe not that often) all over the world. These stories are our stories.  We all have been hurt and alternatively uplifted.  We have all been scorned and yet lauded.  We all know loss.  We all know gain.  We all cry, we all laugh, we all learn and sometimes are, at the same time, even while learning, often stupid. These stores speak to that as well. 

Honestly, I am not a champion of buying books (sorry, authors) because I love our flawed library system. It reaches and provides to the masses, me being one of the masses.  But this is a book to buy. Copperfields has it.  (Please buy it from a bookstore.  Don't get it from Amazon, as much as I like them, support the publisher for this paper back book, it costs less than $20.) Sorry, I digressed. 

But get it.  Read the preface, the introduction and the forward, they give you good information about how this book came to be.  I suggest only reading three or four stories a day or night; they get to you. At first I wanted to read the entire thing at one gulp but there was too much crying and laughing involved and I knew I had to parse it out. 

Tell me how it stuck with you. How you wanted to watch those two Jewish boys on the train from Jerusalem to the bringing down of the Berlin wall. How you know how it feels to be made a fool of and yet laugh about it because you are old enough to not care.   Tell me that you weren't a tiny bit afraid for the preacher who ran out of gas in the middle of the night in Texas, the sky as dark as an oil spill. And more.  
OK, that's it.  Seriously, if you buy this book, you will not be sorry, and if you are, write me. I will buy it back from you, full price, and keep it for my own.

"He said: You know, except for getting impeached, we had a really good day."

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