SOURCE: Seaman, Donna. Review of Loud and Clear, by Anna Quindlen. Booklist 100, no. 11 (1 February 2004): 930-31.

In the following review, Seaman offers a positive assessment of Loud and Clear.

In her first retrospective essay collection since Thinking Out Loud (1993), best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Quindlen continues to unscramble gnarly social issues [in Loud and Clear] with splendid clarity and pithiness, wit and compassion, and uncommon common sense. As always, the autobiographical energizes her persuasive arguments and sense of justice, and Quindlen writes with her signature candor about her children's metamorphoses into young adults, her decision to give up her prestigious New York Times column to write novels, including Blessings (2002), her felicitous return to journalism as the back-page columnist for Newsweek, and her experiences of September 11 and its aftermath. So true is Quindlen's moral compass, and so lucid, vital, and forward-looking are her insights, that her opinion pieces not...