"Love is all there is," said StoryCorps facilitator Lillie Love, to whom this book is dedicated, and the stories in Dave Isay's collection, pulled from interviews recorded for the oral history project, bear witness to her statement. The brief narratives in All There Is attest to love's endurance and its ability to transcend age, culture, distance and circumstance.
Grouped into three sections, these dialogues (and a few monologues) tell of love found, love lost and love found unexpectedly. Some interviewees talk with their spouses; others reminisce with children, friends or relatives about the great love (or loves) of their lives. There is tenderness here, but no sentimentality; most of these stories contain pain as well as joy, the "love lost" section, for example, includes stories of illness, accidents and spouses who died in the towers on 9/11. More hopefully, each story demonstrates love's tenacity in the face of difficulties such as death, divorce, separation or age; most also have some amusing or unexpected element to them. A chance meeting at a New York City tollbooth, falling in love while deployed in Iraq, reconnecting with a lost love after decades apart: the love in these pages delights in the element of surprise.
For anyone who rejects neat and tidy love stories, but believes in the power of love to shape people's lives, All There Is is a warm, honest and courageous reaffirmation. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams