Book Review: Stealing Fire, Theft By Finding, Hunter of Stories

Duff McDonald on 'Stealing Fire'

I write about business, but I generally can’t stand books about management. An exception: "Stealing Fire: How ­Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work," by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. But forget the part about "work"—that’s just positioning. This is a book about life, about finding flow, the state of peak performance that no spreadsheet can model. It’s a timeless topic but also quite timely: No one is going to nominate 2017 as one of the best years ever, and many among us have resorted to living in a hopeful future when things should make more sense again. "Stealing Fire" reminds us that it’s not what happened yesterday or might happen tomorrow that matters. There is only now. Except, of course, when David Sedaris is telling us what happened that day in 1982. Can Mr. Sedaris make anything funny? I’m quite sure that I’ve laughed out loud more often while reading him than ­every other writer combined. His ­latest collection, "Theft by Finding: ­Diaries (1977-2002)," did not disappoint. Nor did a journey to Tanglewood in August to see him speak. Measured by laughs a minute, seeing David Sedaris reading David Sedaris was the most entertaining evening of my year. And if Mr. Sedaris can make anything funny, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik can write a beautiful sentence about pretty much anything. His own memoir, "At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York," provoked the same reaction in me as all of Mr. Gopnik’s work: I am awed by and ­envious of his craft and simply baffled by the span of his knowledge. Finally, Eduardo Galeano’s "Hunter of Stories," published posthumously, is a highly satisfying final collection of the great Latin American writer’s ­signature ­vignettes, a swirling mix of history, philosophy, fable, poetry, ­humor, memory and conscience. The fragment "Diagnosis of Civilization" ­explains why we need books like "Stealing Fire": "Somewhere in some jungle, someone commented: ‘Civilized people are so strange. They all have watches and none of them has any time.’ "