In The Gift is to the Giver, Mark Gozonsky shares uncommon insights in essays that navigate between the hope of being a force for good and the reality of sigh-inducing, not-what-I-had-in-mind results. These everyman epics play out in the realms of public-school teaching, non-professional baseball-playing, well-intentioned gardening, eclectic music-loving, and semi-cautious urban bicycling. The book includes works first published in The New York Times, The Sun, Lit Hub and the Best American series, and will appeal to fans of David Sedaris, public radio, and the New York Mets. Gozonsky shows a knack for distilling life-lessons out of frustration, pushback, and indifference. “A big reason I became a teacher is to be an aqueduct of love,” he writes, “passing it along from my life into the lives of my students. This is a nice idea; however, in practice love in teaching is like meat in a sausage, requiring extensive processing... Otherwise, you’re just sitting up there at the front of the classroom in your altruistic broth, and to your students, you look just like a giant clam, something seemingly inanimate, with a big smile, easily broken.” Gozonsky does break, but he more frequently bends and mends. With a jaunty tone and a zig-zagging structure wherein things come full circle, the essays and stories in this collection turn on the process by which disillusionment becomes insight. For example, in his best-known essay, “Gritty All Day Long,” he seeks to mend a brain injury that has left him seeing double by trying out for an adult baseball league. Waiting to be picked long after his initial optimism has waned, he bargains: “From now on I could and would be kinder to the not-good-enough.” The Gift is to the Giver is a distillation of a lifetime of such thinking about how to be a positive influence and the effect of making the effort. As one early reader reports, “I find the writing beautiful and the observations satisfying and very wise. Extremely useful book. Not many books are this useful.”