Mostrando resultados por autor "Ann Wroe" en Todas las categorías

The obituaries that appear in The Economist are remarkable because of the unpredictable selection of people to be written about, the surprising lives they lead - but also for the style in which the obituary is written. The selection for this book ranges far and wide, including Jean Bedel Bokassa and Pope Jean Paul II, Pamela Harriman and Harry Oppenheimer, Akio Morita and J. K. Galbraith, Jean Baudrillard and Syd Barrett, Estee Lauder and Hunter Thomson, Bip (the legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau) and even Alex the African Grey (science's best known parrot).

Ann Wroe, obituaries editor for The Economist, reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page. Through her experiences and through people she has known, studied, or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after in this breathtaking combination of poetry, memoir, and observation.

'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In Lifescapes, the acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls.