Showing results by narrator "Ann Wroe" in All Categories

'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.

"A lyrical, radiant memoir." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review 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...