Robert Atwan

I've really enjoyed some of the many yearly "Best American" collections, especially the "Best American Science and Nature Writing", so when I came across this 2011 collection of essays at a library sale a while back, I figured I'd give it a go, too. I have to say, my feelings about this collection are a little more mixed than they usually are about the science and nature ones. The best of the essays here are excellent. (Bridget Potter's "Lucky Girl," about her experience attempting to obtain show more an abortion in 1962, particularly sticks in my mind.) The rest mostly range from okay to very good, with only one that I'd unhesitatingly call bad. (That would be Bernadette Esposito's "A-LOC," which was just incoherent, and filled with ridiculous New Age claptrap to boot.) And it features a gratifyingly diverse collection of many different kinds of voices.

But even many of the very well-written essays, taken one after another, started to feel a little unsatisfying to me. There is, perhaps, a limit to my appetite for random snippets of navel-gazing from strangers, and there is quite a bit of that here. Enough of it, in fact, that one of the pieces included -- Christy Vannoy's "A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay" -- itself acknowledges and satirizes both the self-indulgence of the whole exercise and the tendency of essayists to focus squarely on their personal suffering. Which, hoo boy, do the essays here do. It really is a cavalcade of depressing events: cancer, abuse, hospitalization, dementia, violence, and death. So it's sometimes an affecting or a thought-provoking read, but never a happy one. Mind you, the essays that I think work the very best are the ones that look outward as they look inward, ones that position the writers' negative experiences in some kind of larger context, even if only implicitly. And the essays that do that most effectively probably make the entire collection worthwhile. show less

I gave this book five stars even though I didn't finish a couple of the essays. Even if I didn't like them, they were worthy selections.

My favorite in this year's collection was Mark Doty's "Insatiable," in which he writes of the new-to-me connection between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker, and includes insights from his own life.

Miah Arnold's "You Owe Me" is a heartbreaking account of teaching English and poetry to kids undergoing cancer treatment.

Ken Murray's "How Doctors Die" should be show more required reading, and reaffirms everything I've been learning in the past few years about the many costs *to the patient* of overtreatment and "doing everything" at end of life.

I pre-order very few books, but I've already ordered the 2013 volume, due out in October. show less

As always in a collection of magazine articles, some will be mysteriously uninteresting ("why did they pick that?"), some will be workman-good but forgettable, some will be memorable and worth marking for later re-reading, and if lucky one or two will be classic. While there were no classics in this issue, there were a couple that made the issue worthwhile.

The first essay is one of the toughest things I've read in a while, by Patricia Brieschke called "Cracking Open", it recounts the show more multiple surgeries her baby went through, all without anesthesia - until recently doctors believed babies feel no pain and operated with no pain killers of any kind. Her detailed descriptions of the babies clenched fists and whaling cries reminded me of watching a Holocaust documentary, not for the faint of heart, yet so very common. Barbaric, Jim.

"Becoming Adolf" by Rich Cohen is hilarious, fascinating and educational. It's the history of the "toothbrush" moustache that Hitler and Charlie Chaplin wore, how it came about, and why they wore it. Turns out it was an American style the Germans co-opted. It was a modern, uniform (industrial), dashing dandy compared to the long, wild moustaches of the 19th century. The writing is superb, I plan to seek out more by Cohen.

"Candid Camera" by Anthony Lane is a tribute to the Leica camera, made in Germany. I'd heard of this legendary camera, but didn't know why it was so revered - now I know. I want one so bad it hurts. This article may end up costing me a lot of money.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2011 cc-by-nd show less

There's a lot of great reading here. The carefully curated collection of essays starts strong with Twain's observation of natural American clanishness using the metaphor of "corne-pone opinions". This is almost the best of the best. For me the best here is muir's celebration of Stickeen the explorer dog. I can picture the plucky animal conquering his own fears at the glacier bridge and the twinkling in his eyes as he recollects the close call with Muir. Also very good is pioneer community show more organizer jane Addams seeing in women their personal struggles in their desires to see it purported "devil baby". For the Hemingway piece about the running of the bulls i am further confirmed that at this point in my life I am unimpressed with his fiction but find his nonfiction enjoyable enough. Mencken's gonzo reporting of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" reads like Hunter S. himself. I also am starting to see emerge from the dark night of my ignorance the constellation of brights in American literature: Sontag (brilliant disection of "camp" that I now know predates Friday the 13th), independent polymath Edmund Wilson, James Agee, etc. Didion discursive assaying and of the turbulent 60s is in the Montaigne tradition and Bellow's "Graven Images" is an insightful musing on photography that could extend from 1997 to today's struggles with 24hour news camers body cameras, etc.

These are chronologically arranged but I think topical could have been better: death (two on suicide), the arts, society. Even our long struggles with racism: Wright, Angelou, Hurston and even Alice Walker's poignant search for Hurston's grave. show less