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The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series )
Books: CookBooks: Food and Wine Magazine: Item 6
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The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series )by Susan Orlean and Robert Atwan
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful: Indigestible mixture, January 22, 2006 Reviewer:D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - I sympathize with the worthy aims of this compilation. It would be shame for such magnificent pieces of writing to remain ephemeral, never to be aired outside the pages of magazines. Yet the mixture is indigestible. I found it hard to read it through and shift my moods. It was like eating through a buffet table. Probably reading through it is the wrong way to do it. You should browse and pick on one that interests you, but that's exactly what you do at the newsstand or thumbing through a magazine, and that's where I'm afraid these belong. Two of the best essays for me were the Foreword and Introduction by Susan Orlean and Robert Atwan,which discuss the place of the essay in modern literature. The reason the they were the best was because they caught and held me at the moment where I was deciding whether to read a book of essays. That's the point I'm trying to make. Maybe I'll come back to David Foster Wallace's essay next time I'm deciding whether to eat lobster or to Paul Crenshaw's next time there's a tornado warning. Meanwhile I'll keep up my subscriptions to the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Asimov's and Antioch Review and pick up the Atlantic and New Yorker at Penn Station and I'll feel I've done my duty by the essay.
From Publishers Weekly
Author and New Yorker staff writer Orlean (The Orchid Thief) says in her introduction that the best essays are not mere records of a subject but are, rather, extraordinary accounts that "reflect the thinking and emotions of the writer." While many (perhaps too many) of the 25 essays here come from the New Yorker, small magazines are represented, and the writing is anything but conventional. Each work pulls the reader deep into the author's world; each is a remarkable first-person account of a life. Only one, Mark Greif's sharp rant "Against Exercise," deviates from this form. Food is a recurring theme. E.J. Levy remembers his mother by way of the romantic Julia Child meals she prepared while he was growing up. David Foster Wallace details everything the reader could possibly want to know about the lobster. Other topics vary from Cathleen Schine's moving discussion of attempting to save her dangerous and self-destructive dog to David Sedaris's humorous tribute to his boyfriend, "Old Faithful." Whatever the topic, this popular series continues to delight and surprise, and per Orlean's definition of an excellent essay, provides a singular glimpse into the authors' lives. (Oct. 5)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
The attractions of this distinguished annual collection are many. There's the ah-ha pleasure of recognizing the guest editor as an exemplary essayist, the quick scan to ascertain how many contributors' names are familiar and how many are new, and the pep-rally aspect of embracing a literary form cherished by many for its intimacy, versatility, and provocation yet still viewed by others as a lesser endeavor than fiction or poetry. In marking the twentieth anniversary of the Best American Essays series, Atwan remembers that in the early days he felt the need to "boost the spirit of essayists," whereas now he can confidently assert that essays are on much firmer ground. Certainly Orlean had no trouble selecting 25 superlative essays that "take a small notion and find the universe inside it." Her choices include Jonathan Franzen on Peanuts; Mark Grief's welcome critique, "Against Exercise"; poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser on the repercussions of a murder; and Sam Pickering and Cathleen Schine pondering dogs. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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