Loud and Clear.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: Book Review

LOUD AND CLEAR BY ANNA QUINDLEN RANDOM HOUSE 2004, 288 PAGES, $24.95

A journalist for three decades, Anna Quindlen has authored four novels, two children's books, and this, her fifth nonfiction title. Her introduction details an e-mail message from her college son on the morning of Sept. 11,2001: "I really need to hear your voice." In this book, readers hear Quindlen's voice "loud and clear." In the newspaper business for over 20 years, Quindlen has served as reporter, editor, and columnist--primarily with The New York Times. Her Times column "Public and Private" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Although she "almost insanely" loved her work with the Times, she left the newspaper in 1995 to write books and a biweekly column for Newsweek. In Loud and Clear, Quindlen arranges selected columns and speeches into five sections: Heart, Mind, Body, Voice, and Soul.

In introducing the "Voice" section, a collection of four speeches, Quindlen mentions that listeners often remark that she speaks just as she writes. She defines a good writer and successful public speaker as one who has a distinctive "voice" and a particular syntax and turn of phrase. Quindlen's work certainly is distinctive--she writes with brilliant insight, erudition, and humor. To read her is to know her, and to know her is to like her, even if one disagrees with some of her views. She obviously writes from the heart about ideas and issues that are of deep personal concern. When a critic called her opinionated, she responded that she is paid for having opinions.

The "Heart" section includes 14 articles primarily about kids and parenting. She writes about her three children growing up--but also about poor, disturbed, and hungry children. In "Mind;' she takes on such issues as abortion, the death penalty, homopbobia, politics, the National Rifle Association/gun laws, the "Under God" debate (including a history of the pledge), and the rights of opponents to the war in Iraq.

A "lifelong feminist" and an affirmative action hire at The New York Times, Quindlen discusses "the woman thing" in the "Body" section. Quindlen has a "warm personal relationship with God," and she often pictures "her" as smiling down on we poor mortals. Among the essays about the advance of feminism, one is especially poignant: Quindlen considers the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the apotheosis of dignity. Other issues in this section include sexual assault, attitudes of men...