Journalist Schulz (Being Wrong) presents a charming and relatable portrait of her late father, in a memoir about processing grief and recognizing and learning from loss by finding new relationships and experiences. She describes the person she knew her father to be and highlights his own losses and findings in his colorful life. Then the narrative gently turns to showcase a burgeoning romantic relationship that overlaps with Schulz's grief; this development gives readers another character to love. Schulz collects profound insights into love, how relationships develop and grow, and the new things we continue to find in loved ones, even after they're gone. Is love discovered, uncovered, remembered? For Schultz, it can be all of the above, especially as her relationship with her wife Casey unfolds. VERDICT Overall, the narrative is somewhat philosophical and perhaps a little cerebral, as it discusses loss and seeking, but it's full of curiosity and a great deal of love and compassion that readers will relish. Recommended for most libraries and an excellent book club selection.--Amanda Ray, Iowa City P.L.

"Just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding," writes Pulitzer Prize winner Schulz (Being Wrong) in this stunning memoir. As Schulz recounts, she contended with the pain and ecstasy of both narratives colliding when she fell in love with her future wife, C., 18 months before Schulz's father died. She explores the grief of loss and joy of finding through penetrating reflections on the life of her father, a deep thinker with an endless appetite for the world; an "intimate study of beloved" wife; and philosophical forays into literature, poetry, and art. She ruminates on the "intrinsic pleasure of discovery" in quest narratives, is reminded how "the entire plan of the universe consists of losing" when C. reads her Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and thinks of her father's memorial service, one of the "greatest parties I ever attended," when remembering C. S. Lewis's quote that "we all have... many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst." By the end of these exquisite existential wanderings, Schulz comes to a quiet truce with her finding that "life, too, goes by contraries... by turns crushing and restorative... comic and uplifting." Schulz's canny observations are a treasure. (Jan.)

Schulz begins her lovely memoir on loss by quoting the great poet Robert Lowell: "Yet why not say what happened?" he asked. Why not indeed. Schulz admits that she always disliked euphemisms for dying. But then her father died and she began using the common expressions that we all use, like "passed away" and "no longer with us." Her deeply felt memoir, though, is more than a reflection on the loss of a parent. It is about the idea of loss in general ("of all the other things I had lost over time") and the passage of time. Loss can refer to many things of course, to something as simple, and affecting as the loss of a childhood toy, or to the loss of a wallet, or the loss of a presidential election. Loss, in other words, encompasses the "trivial and the consequential." But we also find things, and Schulz considers that in fresh and evocative ways as well. The genius of Lost & Found is in its quotidian nature: in the acknowledgment that the end of a life is not only normal but the "necessary way of things," as Schulz puts it. Schulz is a wonderful writer, poetic and profound, and Lost & Found is a poignant, loving, wise, and comforting meditation on grief from both a personal and collective perspective.

A Pulitzer Prize--winning New Yorkerstaff writer muses on the interconnectedness of loss and gain. Losing her father made Schulz feel all too keenly how a once "familiar world [could suddenly] feel alien and inaccessible." But in the year before he died, the author also met the woman whose presence would counterbalance her father's devastating absence. In this memoir, Schulz transforms this extraordinary coincidence of major life events--death and falling in love--into an extended, philosophically edged reflection on the meaning of losing and its opposite, finding. Starting with the former, Schulz examines etymology. "The verb 'to lose' has its taproot sunk in sorrow," she writes, but only around the 14th and 15th centuries did the word begin to expand in meaning to encompass "the circle of what we can lose." Drawing on such disparate topics as the sudden disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Schulz observes that losses are devastating to us not just because "they defy reality but because they reveal it" in all its ephemeral fragility. In the second section, the tone lightens considerably as the author contrasts loss with two forms of finding: recovery, which "reverses the impact of loss," and discovery, which "changesour world." Her voice aglow with wonderment, Schulz then tells the story of how she met fellow writer C. A friend had introduced them via email, but the day they met, the author's brain began the "life-altering organization" that eventually led to Schulz's offering C. her dead father's wedding ring as a symbol of moving forward in love rather than remaining paralyzed for fear of future loss. Elegant and thought-provoking, Schulz's book is as much a celebration of the circle of life as it is an elegant reminder to all that "we are here to keep watch, not to keep." A searchingly intelligent memoir and psychological meditation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.