This collection is excellent! I find it informative and engaging, and it's full of historical references and lovely prose. The essays flow well together but aren't so similar that I get bored. They vary in length in a way that makes the book easy to pick up or put down when I'm busy or only want to read for a short while. I teach English at a university and even considered teaching an essay from this collection. Elena Passarello will be speaking as a visiting writer at our university and I've got tons of questions about her research and process. If you enjoy essayists, you'll certainly enjoy this interrogation of sound, history, and human nature. This is NOT simply a book of essays, but a book of hybrid essays which are engaging, well-grouped, and thought-provoking. I haven't quite finished this collection, but I've included it in the reading list for my master's thesis.
From Farinelli, the eighteenth century castrato who brought down opera houses with his high C, to the recording of "Johnny B. Goode" affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, Let Me Clear My Throat dissects the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There are murders of punk rock crows, impressionists, and rebel yells; Howard Dean's "BYAH!" and Marlon Brando's "Stella!" and a stock film yawp that has made cameos in movies from A Star is Born to Spaceballs. The voice is thought's incarnating instrument and Elena Passarello's essays are a riotous deconstruction of the ways the sounds we make both express and shape who we are—the annotated soundtrack of us giving voice to ourselves.
Elena Passarello is an actor and writer originally from Charleston, South Carolina. She studied nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa, and her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Slate, Iowa Review, The Normal School, Literary Bird Journal, Ninth Letter, and in the music writing anthology Pop Till the World Falls Apart. She has performed in several regional theaters in the East and Midwest, originating roles in the premieres of Christopher Durang's Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge and David Turkel's Wild Signs and Holler. In 2011 she became the first woman winner of the annual Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans.
The book itself has a pleasing heft and a shine to the cover. The pages are thick and excellent in quality, and the inner pages touching the front and back cover are both embossed.
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