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Title: The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Atwan ISBN: 0-618-15587-2 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 10 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Not bad, but not the best of the century
Comment: Some good essays here, but a number of boring ones as well, if they had 100 years of essays to choose from, I'm suprised this was the best they could come up with.
Rating: 5
Summary: Authority and beauty
Comment: I don't think I'm alone in viewing essays as members of a somewhat lower caste than novels and non-fiction books. Maybe it's because I associate the essay with newspapers, and people like George Will who pretend to know more than their readers. I think the editors of this essay collection understood that popular conception, and tried very hard to fight it. In line with that fight, one of the organizing themes of this book seems to be ``Essays About Individual Experiences." True, many of the essays take individual experiences and move into a more general realm, but they're always grounded in the author's experiences. Contrast this with George Will - Trinity College undergrad, Princeton grad school in political science - writing essays about poverty and policy. There's more legitimacy - in my mind, anyway - in Richard Wright writing an essay about ``The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."
Many of the essays in this book, like Wright's, are on the subject of race in America. We have Zora Neale Hurston's ``How It Feels To Be Colored Me" (``Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How *can* any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me."); Alice Walker's ``Looking For Zora," on her attempts to find Hurston's lonely, abandoned, unkempt gravestone in Florida; Maya Angelou's ``I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" (later part of a book of the same name); Martin Luther King's ``Letter From Birmingham Jail"; and so forth. As the editors suggest, race has been one of the longest-running struggles in the United States; it shouldn't surprise us that it has produced works of such power. The autobiographical format of these essays particularly fits with their subject matter. That format works a lot better than, say, a collection of statistics (however truthful those statistics might be).
_Best American Essays_ is far more than a book about race, however. It contains some hilarious essays, like S.J. Perelman's ``Insert Flap `A' and Throw Away" (on his attempts to put together toys for his kids); an essay on bullfighting (Hemingway's ``Pamplona in July"); essays about suicide (``The Crack-Up" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William H. Gass's ``The Doomed In Their Sinking", Edward Hoagland's ``Heaven and Nature"); Stephen Jay Gould on why humans seem to need to divide a complex continuum into a discrete beginning and end (``The Creation Myths of Cooperstown"); and on and on. All of them are almost crystalline in their density of information. All of them left me, after 10 or 12 pages, reeling as though I'd just set down a novel.
I'm particularly fond of William Manchester's essay memorializing the battle of Okinawa (``Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle Of All"). I normally enter essays about war with a large dose of skepticism and revulsion, and this one was no different. ``Great," I thought, ``Manchester was a vet, so this will be another essay about the glory of armed combat." It is nothing at all like that. To use a nice vogue term, it is a deconstruction of what war really is, and what war has become over the centuries. It turned from 15-minute battles around the time of Agincourt to 10-month-long subwars of attrition during World War I. But let's look at those minutes-long battles, says Manchester:
``The dead were bludgeoned or stabbed to death, and we
have a pretty good idea of how this was done. ... Kabar
fighting knives, with seven-inch blades honed to such
precision that you could shave with them, were issued to
Marines ... You drove the point of your blade into a
man's lower belly and ripped upward. In the process, you
yourself became soaked in the other man's gore. After that
charges at Camlann, Arthur must have been half drowned in
blood."
The essay reveals war's pointlessness and the revulsion that mankind must feel in its presence. Coming from someone who fought on Okinawa, it carries more weight than all the world's pundits could ever bestow. The entire volume holds this authority. Since its contributors are also some of the most talented authors that the U.S. has ever known, there's no reason not to buy this astonishing work.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Perfect English Teacher Study
Comment: Since I am studying to be an English Teacher, I found the reading of the essays to be very useful in my studies. They helped me to gain a better understanding of an essay. I was able to picture where the reader was and to feel their pain or joy in what they felt as they wrote the essay. I especially loved the essay from Langston Hughes and Mark Twain. I recommend this book to all, not only those who want to teach but also to those who want to enhance their reading and knowledge.
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Title: The Best American Essays 2003 by Robert Atwan, Anne Fadiman ISBN: 0618341617 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 10 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Best American Short Stories of the Century by John Updike, Katrina Kenison ISBN: 0395843677 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 20 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Art of the Personal Essay : An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present by Phillip Lopate ISBN: 038542339X Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 15 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Best American Essays 2002 (Best American (TM)) by Stephen Jay Gould, Robert Atwan ISBN: 0618049320 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Best American Essays 2001 by Kathleen Norris, Robert Atwan ISBN: 0618049312 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 10 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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