At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope

At the Lost and Found is a dazzling exploration of the most important issues of our time, written in a style that defies categorization. Open it at any chapter and you will be hooked by themes and sentences that are a moveable feast for head, heart, and spirit. Each chapter is like a river journey that will twist and turn your mind down unexpected tributaries that you never thought to follow. And when you reach the end, you will realize you have been traveling one mighty river and all your meandering thoughts and reveries have transported you past places called Lost and Found, where you stopped briefly to satisfy your immense hunger for understanding and meaning in a world gone mad.
Reading Edward Curtin is a feast of many complementary dishes served human family style. His writing is truly unique, fusing the political with the personal, art with astute objective analyses, and the tragic with the comic. From a detailed critique of the Internet and cell phones, one passes effortlessly to the linked bewitchment of CIA propaganda and its assassinations of President Kennedy and the Reverand Martin Luther King, Jr. There are highlights on pot shops and lowlifes Donld Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles; meditations on time, remembering, and forgetting; the endless evil of U.S. wars waged around the world; nuclear war and Trident submarines; Leftist betrayals; the U.S. war against Russia through Ukraine; capitalism and consumerism; the Israeli genocide of Palestinians; the corruption of the U.S. political system; the connection between bread, rebellion, and the search for happiness; Bob Dylan, music, basketball; and much more. This feast of complementary dishes is moving and memorable. Like the mighty river journey, it will bring you to a place of gratitude.
Unlike straightforward political analyses, At the Lost and Found weaves politics through the personal and every person’s search for understanding, happiness, and hope in a world on the edge of an abyss. Slyly laced within it, one will find the author’s personal story lightly limned to suggest that Thoreau was right to remind us that it is always the first person that is speaking, not some disembodied purely objective abstraction. Curtin’s writing follows in the tradition of other essayists who saw life whole, such as James Baldwin, John Berger, and Albert Camus. Add a touch of sly wit, whimsy, and storytelling, and you have the ingredients that make At the Lost and Found a tour de force.