Rating: 
Summary: Heartbreaking waste of time and money
Review: Phew! This book stinks. Who are the people that nominated this thing for a Pulitzer Prize? And how in the world did it become a "finalist"? My read is that Dave Eggers is a self-centered geek. Who cares about his goofy life? He has my empathy for losing his parents to cancer. No doubt it was tough on his whole family and a considerable emotional strain. And his helping to take care of his younger bother is surely a noble cause. But come on, this guy has done nothing to write about. If he has, he certainly didn't mention it in the book. Was it his goofball magazine "Might"? His failure to get on the "Real World"? I found that book to be entirely boring from beginning to end. His attempt at humor is lame. Save your time and money. The only book I can recall being worse than this one is worthless tripe Milton Berle's son (my daddy didn't love me enough) wrote about his dad.
Rating:
Summary: Hurry and board the ship of fools!
Review: This is perhaps, per time spent (by me -- grudingly reading it all the way through so that I could be absolutely positive how much I hated it) and praise given (by others whom I don't understand whatsoever), the worst book I have ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Vaguely Familiar
Review: It's been said that Eggers is basically just staring at his own behind, and I began this book thinking "take a ?!@ chance Dave!" It's true that this book is ridiculously self-referential, -aggrandizing, -etc etc and that any critique I could think of he's already covered his ...with by writing it in the book. My attitude, however, began to change as I read more and more. This book does not come off as calculated, in any sort of commercial or literary sense. Dave Eggers himself is calculating, maybe, and it comes through in the book. His personality (snide, smug, neurotic, funny, earnest) is what's in the book. As a writer, "he wrote what he knew", to use the old cliche. He just opened up his head and out it came. If someone is calculating and endlessly self-involved, that person can write a completely honest and heartfelt book that comes off as calculating and endlessly self-involved. Also, as a Chicago native who went to Champaign for school and ended up in Lincoln Park, some of these passages really freaked me out.
Rating:
Summary: Some really teriffic passages, but a bit overly indulgent
Review: There are several passages in this book that are side-splitting funny. His descriptions of playing frisbee with his little brother Toph are absolutely to die for. His recollection of the moment he notices that the music at his sister Beth's wedding is the KISS song "Beth" almost had me rolling on the floor.These moments are weighed down, however, by several rather long overly self-indulgent passages. His interview with the MTV Real World producer is a good example of this. He seems to get so caught up in crafting the most emotionally impactful rendition of his traumatic life, that he forgets to make it interesting. For the most part, I skimmed those sections of the book. Still worth spending a few days reading.
Rating: 
Summary: The title says it all, doesn't it
Review: This is the most amazing book I have ever read. I read it for the first time about a year and a half ago, and have read it about 5 times since then. I think Dave Eggers is the best writer since Oscar Wilde. This book really speaks for itself in my opinion.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: (Two-and-a-half-stars) At one point in his overlong, overwrought memoir, Eggers trumpets the virtues of self-absorption. "My feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring," he writes. Whatever the truth of that self-serving statement might be, his book is proof-positive that self-absorption alone does not a gripping memoir make. Eggers and his crew of well-bred neohippie pseudo-philosophers believed themselves, in the mid-90s, to be at the vanguard of a new literary order. The revolution has been slow in coming, but with the publication of this book and his quarterly magazine, McSweeney's, Eggers's brand of tongue-in-cheek navel-gazing appears to be gathering quite a following among the more literate members of Generation X. To the extent AHWOSG is predictive of the kind of fiction this "movement" will produce, however, I consider it a terrible waste. Eggers is a talented writer, no question. But instead of employing his substantial gifts in the service of something serious and meaningful, he settles for flip "observations," strained irony, and shallow self-indulgence. Make no mistake--the first chapter of AHWOSG is very, very good and very, very moving. As for the rest of the book, the strongest parts are those in which Eggers rises above himself to describe or imagine the thoughts and feelings of others-Toph and his parents, most notably. The rest of the book is, alas, a tedius display of the author's quirks and neuroses and floor plans of his various apartments. At one point, Eggers makes some genuinely funny observations about MTV's "The Real World" and its singular role in laying bare the worst of the emptiness and pettiness of Generation X. But AHWOSG is little more than "The Real World" in book form, perhaps with a slight boost in intelligence. I wanted to like this book a great deal. That it received such glowing praise from almost every literary quarter astounds me. Maybe my taste in writing is thoroughly passe. Maybe I miss the days when writers--even ambitious young writers like Eggers and his McSweeney's crew--struggled to distill and encapsulate the world outside themselves. But this new age of novel-gazing, arch in-jokes, and blatant self-promotion bores me to tears. This book could have been inestimably better--but only if it was about 300 pages shorter.
Rating:
Summary: laugh cry and find peace with Dave Eggers.
Review: Books like this one are hard to find. The first 4 chapters will stick with you for a long time, and as Eggers notes in his hilarious prologue, the chapters following are indeed more disjointed. Although in the table of contents Dave informs the reader the pages prior to the first chapter are not a necessary read, READ THEM!! They just may be your favorite part of the book. And they will only assist in preparing you for what lies ahead of you for the next 350+ pages. Eggers takes you on an amazing journey, of what is essentially the essence of his life. It is truly truly truly a heartbreaking work. And it is truly genius. When I finished the book (in 4 days) I definitely had the unmistakable urge to look him up (the author) and ask him to meet for coffee. You will feel acquainted, familiar and friendly- reading this work of him life makes him feel like an old friend- a really important really amazing old friend. The view we get into his heart and mind is unlike that which we get of our real life friends, and it is so staggeringly heartbreaking to see the connections we can really feel with another person. Dave Eggers made me want to attempt the same bold and courageous task he took on- to write about our lives and our truths and our feelings in a way that is honest, free, emotional, painstaking and completely no holds barred. The kind of bravery it takes to be as honest as he did is contagious. Maybe one day I will gather enough guts to do just that. This book is a real masterpiece, but most of all it is just plain REAL.
Rating:
Summary: A heartbreaking and heart-felt work
Review: When I first started reading AHWOSG, I didn't quite know what to expect. Should I read the preface? It is part of the book, though Dave Eggers clearly says, "There is no overwhelming need to read the preface." I decided to take his word for it and come back to read it after I finished the book. I did however, notice the large drawing of a stapler, with the descriptive caption, "Here is a drawing of a stapler." Funny, if not entirely random. I was somewhat caught off guard at first by the style of writing. Eggers jumps around in time a lot, sometimes in mid-sentence. It is somewhat like a "stream of consciousness," and took some time to get used to. After a while though, I was able to follow his style, and I actually found it quite freeing. The most memorable moments by far are those Dave shares with his brother Toph. When Dave's parents both died of cancer, Dave was made Toph's guardian because they were closest in age. Dave sees this as his opportunity to try his own way of parenting and not follow in his parents' footsteps. His relationship with Toph seems new, exciting, and sometimes downright crazy. Together they are an unstoppable pair; they are a dynamic duo ready to take on the world and anyone who stands in their way. One of the funniest parts is where Dave creates makeshift menus for each dinner possibility, but also states: "Unavailable is food that swims in its own excrement. Pasta is not available, especially not that regurgitated mess known as lasagna." At times, Eggers' sheer narcissistic rage is too much to swallow. However, I think he is completely aware of this, and qualifies it in the "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book" section. He says that the reader may want to skip the middle, "namely pages 239-351, which concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting." The title says it all. This heartbreaking and heart-felt prose is a beautifully written (and almost never boring) account of one man's life. It is a must read, if only to experience the interesting style that the author uses to tell his story.
Rating: 
Summary: Must have long attention-span.
Review: Dave Eggers' style of writing in this book caught me off-guard at first. It seemed usual for an author to describe his or her surroundings in the way that he did at the beginning, when he described his yard in the winter. But then after a short conversation between his mother and himself, he seemed as if he were talking directly to me, or as if I was listening in on his thoughts. The style of this book is very different to most other novels; however, contradicting what my reading partner wrote, I do not feel that Eggers "totally threw out conventional style rules for memoir writing." I think that he merged these rules with his own. He can go into great detail when describing a room and make it sound almost poetic, but then he can plunge into his own mind and let you hear his thoughts, almost exactly as anyone's thoughts might occur. He gives the readers a glimpse of his eventful, depressing, and sometimes humorous life through his own eyes. Eggers and his little brother, Toph, have a very close relationship with each other, even though they bicker constantly. They seem to be playing around a lot. They torture the neighbours with [made up] sounds of child abuse, they hit each other with sticks, they slide in their socks across the house; they're not really getting much done. Pages and pages go by and nothing much happens other than Eggers' rambling on and on about something that seems important at the time, but by the end of the chapter, it's completely random and irrelevant to the story. Young, sensible Toph is the one who has to constantly bring Eggers back down to earth after he's rambled on and on about almost nothing for ten pages. Eggers has a very vague sense of time in this book. At certain points in the book, I'm not sure how old Dave and Toph are, and Toph's extensive vocabulary all throughout the book doesn't help with this confusion. In conclusion, I think that the story was outstanding, however, I would have much rather preferred it to have been written in a more traditional style; less rambling, more sense of time.
Rating:
Summary: Yawn.
Review: This is exactly the kind of overhyped shallow reading that I have had enough of--I am tired of this oh so cynical not quite funny brand of literature that my generation is embracing as deep thought. This book is pretentious, uninteresting & desperately not funny, like a long joke with no punchline The sad thing is that the joke is on you, dear reader.
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