The Best American Essays of the Century

Rating:
Summary: Authority and beauty
Review: 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:
Summary: one woman's eloquent collection
Review: Many would regard the task of selecting "The Best American Essays of the Century" as a most daunting honor, to be approached with much nail biting and trepidation. Whatever you choose, dissenters will howl. Oates, no shirker when it comes to hard work and firm opinions, offers her choices with confidence. "My preference was always to essays that, springing from intense personal experience, are nonetheless significantly linked to larger issues."

Arranged chronologically, the essays lean heavily toward reflections on the human condition within American culture. The writing is, without exception, eloquent and insightful. Race is a pervasive theme and inspires the most powerful pieces. The best essay in the book is James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son;" visceral and intimate, full of pain, bewilderment and searing honesty, whole of heart and intellect. Pieces by Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Langston Hughes, no matter how familiar, still shiver the soul with the conjunction of powerful intellect, soul-searing experience and the intimacy of an articulate voice.

My second favorite essay could hardly be more different. John Muir's "Stickeen," has it all: adventure, peril, pathos, the passion for nature and exploration, and the curious relationship between man and dog; a rousing good story.

Other themes place the writer in his contemporary culture; F. Scott Fitzgerald wrestling with despair, Jane Addams contemplating the downtrodden old women who comfort themselves with myths, Katherine Anne Porter internalizing the atom bomb, Tom Wolfe escorting a settled man to his rebellious son's slum apartment, Randolph Bourne exploring how his crippling disabilities have shaped his life, Mary McCarthy confronting anti-Semitism in a railroad club car.

Some find a kernel of sharp insight in a childhood memory: James Agee recalling his undefined place in the tableau of a summer night, Eudora Welty on her early reading habits, E.B. White facing mortality while revisiting a boyhood camp with his son, Edmund Wilson taking stock of the old stone house in the bleak Adirondacks only to discover he has carried it with him all his life, Cynthia Ozick devouring books in her parents' depression-era drug store, Vladimir Nabokov probing the awakening of consciousness in his Russian boyhood.

There are literary essays, but they are not the strongest: T.S. Eliot on tradition in literature, Robert Frost on sound and meaning, Susan Sontag defining "camp." And there are gaps. Joan Didion's "White Album" explores the confusion of the 60s, but there are no real political essays. The women's movement, save for a didactic Adrienne Rich piece, might never have happened, ditto for Watergate and even World War I. There are only two war pieces: harrowing Vietnam reportage from Michael Herr and William Manchester's thoughtful response to the Okinawa War Memorial. The immigrant experience is represented by Richard Rodriguez' reflection on the pain and promise of becoming Americanized and Maxine Hong Kingston's poignant story of a shunned Chinese aunt, a long-ago suicide. Science is almost completely absent, save Stephen Jay Gould on the creation myth and Lewis Thomas' famous, brief essay "The Lives of a Cell." There's no political satire and no history, except as autobiography is history. But there are two essays dealing with suicide (William H. Gass, Edward Hoagland).

This is one person's careful collection of a century's important voices. All of the writers are well known, all have published at least one collection of essays, all of the pieces have been collected at least once before. Although there are a few humorous pieces (Mark Twain, S.J. Perelman, James Thurber), this is a sober and reflective collection, each essay the product of long thought.

The book would be a rich and valuable reading experience at any time, but is especially comforting during these somber, grieving days. This is paradoxical, since the best pieces are those that lay bare the country's worst injustice - racial prejudice. I expected to have trouble reading these painful essays, not wanting to feel angry or ashamed about my country right now, but it wasn't so. The unparalleled eloquence, the intimacy of these articulate voices, stand in such stark contrast to the vicious ignorance they've endured, that they hearten the reader by proving the strength and durability of the human heart.

Rating:
Summary: The Perfect English Teacher Study
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, but not the best of the century
Review: 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:
Summary: Could Hardly Get Past The Title
Review: This is a wonderful collection of essays that gave me several hours of reading pleasure. I take strong exception, however, to the use of "Best" in the title. Another Amoazon reviewer says it is the only book of essays one need ever buy. Both claims greatly exceed the load-bearing capacity of the 55 essays included. It is an impossible task to reduce a century's worth of essays down to a handful that are "best". If Joyce Carol Oates and her co-editor Robert Atwan had called it "Some of the Best American Essays of the Century" I would have no quarrel with them. Some of the selections strain the definition of "essay", but are marvelous pieces of writing, nevertheless.

Mark Twain's "Corn-pone Opinions" leads off. "'You tell me whar a man gits his corn-pone, en I"ll tell you what his 'pinion is'". Ms Oates says Twain is making a "ringing denunciation of cultural chauvinism". I read Twain as saying we are all captives of the conformity we accept as the price for the approval of our peers. Either way the editors are as guilty of "corn-pone opinions" as any of us. More than a third of the pieces are by famous authors -- best-known for their fiction and poetry rather than for their essays. Writers who worked primarily in the essay form are badly under-represented, e.g. Hannah Arendt, Dwight McDonald, Roger Angell, Jaques Barzun, AJ Liebling, MFK Fisher, Lewis Lapham, Noel Perrin, Nati Hentoff, Walter Lippmann, VS Naipul, Calvin Trillin, Andrew Tobias, and Gary Wills. Atwan appends a bibliography of 200 "notable" authors excluded from the collection.

Oates says her collection's theme is the "...expression of personal experience within the historical". One can measure her interest in the historical issues and events of the 20th century by tabulating the essays devoted to them: racial and ethnic issues -- high; politics -- nil; social problems -- high; sex and gender problems -- low; literary matters -- high; sports and popular culture -- low. Only two are about the dozen wars Americans fought during the century, both of them brilliant: William Manchester on the good war and Michael Herr on the bad war. Oates includes TS Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", calling it one of the "two most important literary essays of the twentieth century". It may have seemed so when she was a student, but Eliot's theory of literary criticism has about the same relevance at the end of the century as William Jennings Bryan's silver standard.

Rating:
Summary: The only essay collection you will ever need
Review: Unlike the collection of short stories published last year, the editors did not have to limit themselves to essays printed in specific publications, leaving them able to pick the cream of the crop. But they aren't just well written pieces of non-fiction from some of the greatest writers like Tom Wolfe, Lewis Thomas, or Cynthia Ozick. Arranged in chronological order, they give a great sense of where we were as a country and how we've developed in the past hundred years. The only flaw is that many of the pieces, such as Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," and Maya Angelou's excerpt from "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" will be familiar to most readers, but it's worth it to have these essays bound in one collection.