The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism

From the foreword by Geneva Overholser.

What is it about really fine writers, how they delight, intrigue, compel us?

Style, you say. But style is not something you begin with. Rather, it's what you end up with, a result of far more fundamental traits. Traits such as an ear and an eye and a heart, traits that Madeliene Blais has honed superbly well.

This is a book well named: The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. The heart is surely first among Blais's gifts. Whether she is writing about the famous--playwright tennessee Williams, novelist Mary Gordon--or about the least elevated among us--a teenage prostitute infected with the AIDS virus, a homeless schizophrenic--she brings to her subjects an incomparable empathy.

Author: Madeleine Blais
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 10/24/1994
Pages: 360
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 8.74h x 5.46w x 0.96d
ISBN13: 9780870239427
ISBN10: 0870239422
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | Essays

About the Author
Madeleine Blais is professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts. In 1980, while on the staff of the Miami Herald, she won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her latest book is In These Girls Hope Is a Muscle.