Surviving Crisis (Creative Nonfiction Reader Series)

A guide offering insights into a moment of catharsis that shaped a well-known writers' life features essays by John McPhee, John Edgar Wideman, Cynthia Ozick, Annie Dillard, and others designed to inspire would-be writers to put pen to paper. Reprint. 15,000 first printing. LJ. "

Many of this book's contributors have taken what they might least like the world to know about them and shone a spotlight there. Kathy Dobie describes her promiscuous teen years, culminating with being gangbanged in the back of a beat-up Chevy. Lauren Slater tells of her mind-bending return to the psychiatric hospital where she spent much of her youth, this time as a therapist. Robert McCrum relates the harrowing hours after he suffered a stroke, alone, his new wife halfway around the world, and the telephone just out of reach. And Natalie Kusz recalls the time a hungry Alaskan husky tore off much of her face and scalp. The 20 creative-nonfiction stories collected in Surviving Crisis, most but not all first-person accounts, are devastating. But there is something cathartic, for the reader as well as the writer, about someone facing his or her worst moments head on and writing about them with honesty, clarity, and--in the case of Marjorie Gross's stunning piece on her battle with ovarian cancer--even humor. --Jane Steinberg