The Heart is an Instrument : Portraits in Journalism

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Madeleine Blais is perhaps best known for her insightful essays chronicling the experiences of the disadvantaged and dispossessed members of American society.

But even when she trains her journalistic eye on individuals in less extreme circumstances, what sets her writing apart is a remarkable talent for conveying the psychological reality of each subject's world.

In this volume, she has gathered 15 of her most memorable essays, vivid portraits that speak to the realities of contemporary American experience.

It tells the stories of a schizophrenic woman who lives in a bus station in an affluent Florida city, a teenage prostitute with AIDS whose knowledge of the disease is as limited and broken as her understanding of the forces that led her to a life in the streets, and an immigrant Jamaican housekeeper whose life is enriched by the sacrifices she makes for the people back home.

There are riveting profiles of a 12 year old boy who killed his mother and brother, an 83 year old veteran still fighting a private war, a poet and her daughter with Down syndrome and a social activist who keeps nightly vigils for her dead lover. Other chapters include conversations with novelist Mary Gordon and biographer Justin Kaplan, and a haunting profile of playwright Tennessee Williams at the end of his career.