Rating: 
Summary: Review From FSU Student
Review: "It's hard to convey why this is funny. Maybe this isn't funny, but we're dying. I can barely see; it's killing us. I try to drive straight, wiping my eyes. Wispy clouds hurtle over us, cotton pulled apart by children. For the last group of tourists, he does a little stutter thing with the mooing." (pg. 408); this is a perfect excerpt from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. David Eggers relays to us his story, for the most part, from inside his mind. He tells us his thoughts. He wants his readers to understand his thoughts about everything he does and everything he dreams of doing.
Eggers tells his story with a humorous twist intertwined in it yet it has a serious plot. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius deals with four children, the youngest being seven years of age, losing both of their parents in very close proximity; one dying of heart failure and the other dying of a slow and agonizing form of cancer. The second oldest of the children is the one chosen to be the legal guardian of Toph, the seven year old boy. Eggers elects to have the guardian of Toph be the narrator of the story; I came to the conclusion that this narrator is actually Eggers himself.
As is easy to see, the plot is serious, not funny. A young boy losing his mother and father and having to be raised by an immature, barley legal, boy is a plot that I could not call funny. But somehow this talented author manages to add humor to the story. The book is filled with awkward situations that Toph and his older brother must overcome. The way they both handle the situations is, well, interesting and, at times, even comical.
Toph's older brother comes across as the "lazy" or possibly even the "who cares" type. He's the kind of guardian a child would look at and say "whoa he's cool I wish I could live with him," when actually if you look deep enough into the story he sets his rules just as a parent would. As I have already mentioned above the narrator writes what he is thinking. He lets us look into his mind. He cares for this little boy so much. It just seems as if he does not understand how to show it or even that he wants to show it. I think Eggers is trying (he accomplished it) to give the narrator an appearance of wanting to look tough and guy-like on the outside when really, after reading the book, you see that he does in fact have parent qualities within him. Throughout the book you can see him worrying about Toph and if he is doing a good job with raising him. For example he sits at baseball practice and watches how Toph interacts with the other children his age. By the end of the book the narrator admires Toph. He realizes, while playing Frisbee on the beach, that Toph has turned out to be an alright kid; perhaps he doesn't act exactly like other high school children his age but his older brother did a wonderful job. It is easy to tell after reading the book that Toph's guardian (Eggers) is mad at something or somebody for taking his parents away. He is what you might call an angry writer which, in my opinion, makes for a talented author and a wonderful story.
Rating: 
Summary: Heartbreaking and staggeringly funny
Review: I am a huge reader, from cereal boxes down to Oprah recommendations. This was my favorite book this year. There was no prentension in it, it was a great, unique story told in an interesting, heartbreaking and hilarious way. Humor and pain make great partners! I enjoyed the autobiographical cynicism the writer heaped upon himself, as well as the sometimes brutally realistic pictures he drew. I seldom discover books that are truly different... this is one.
Rating:
Summary: THIS IS A GOOD BOOK
Review: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Book Review If you've ever suffered an incompensateable loss, if you've ever had to take on the task of raising a younger sibling, if you were ever tired and felt like you could not go on anymore, this book is for you. There are few people that would not enjoy this book, but yet it is not for everyone. Eggers brings light to the most seemingly darkest of situations. When the mood seems to be irreversibly plummeting to the point of no return, Eggers turns it around in a complete 180 with a simple, but yet hilarious one liner. Eggers in his early twenties has to suffer with the horrible tragedy of both of his parents dieing within weeks of each other, and leaving him alone to raise his much younger brother. The book constantly revolves around his worrying about the well being of his younger brother, and yet his attempt to have a normal social life with people his age. Making sure his brother gets to school on time, while he tries to work a job.Constantly worrying about if his brother is OK with the babysitter while he is out on a date. Eggers in this semi-autographical work relives parts of his life, many of them only fragments of his childhood and teenage years, he uses them as a window for the reader to look into his past, and examine his sub-consciousness. Most of the fragments are interjected through out the book, but yet they seem to flow ever so perfectly. The book has an unyielding power about it that draws the reader in, and the reader must force themselves to put the book down, while only to be constantly thinking about it until they are able to open the book again and immediately be sucked in. This book has claws that will grip the reader and it is almost a struggle to get out of their grasp. Eggers holds nothing back in this novel, he lists every internal conflict, his every inappropriate thought, his complete honesty allows the reader to see into the deepest depths of his mind. Eggers book is a literal masterpiece, and no one can walk away from this book unchanged. You don't need to lose both of your parents, and have to raise your younger brother on your own to relate to this book. Most people can relate to some aspect of this book, possibly Eggers' tiredness in keeping his dieing magazine alive, can be related to a similar situation in your life, or if you've ever had an inappropriate thought pop into your mind, you can most defiantly find solstice in Eggers book.
Rating: 
Summary: Was David Sedaris put up to writing that one-line review?
Review: How Dave Eggers be put in the same category as David Sedaris is beyond me. The book was okay. The title annoying. He sounded fairly interesting on a Charlie Rose interview, but I really suspect the guy doesn't have another story to write after this one. His prose are nonexistent; his vocabulary is limited (yeah, i know that's how real people speak); and the ending was a bratty ranting of sorts. I admire his dedication to his younger brother, though. I just don't think he hits the core like Sedaris and he's not nearly has humorous. Just my opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Reveiw done for a Chinese e-zine (long)
Review: As the winter and holidays converge, as the disincentives to travel compound owing to economic and security uncertainties, book, as it were, is threatening (again) to become man's second best friend, after the perennial champion dog. (I'm not bitching about this.) For those who don't have dogs or love dogs but have asthma and hence have to settle for the second best, I recommend a read of the memoir, fictional (or fictionalized) autobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG) by Dave Eggers, written before the author was thirty, as it has become the necessity today (Charlotte Church wrote one when she was 16.) Confucius needs to reconsider whatever he said about man reaching his 30. The book received almost universal acclaim from the critics, some of it due to the slack cut for a literary rookie, I'm sure. But some positively gave the genius mantle to Eggers, who claimed it, with a lengthy regular-print-sized disclaimer and a swollen tongue in cheek. The latter claim is obviously unfounded. If one ventures to read the barometer of popular opinions on Amazon.com, uncalibrated, to be sure, he will find that the book is quite polarizing. Some (most) think Eggers is 3G, Genius, Guru, and God. Some (fewer than most) (disagree). I'm not going to referee this debate. Let's go on to the book and what I think of it (so far). First a bit biographic background. In the early 90's, Dave Eggers, then 22, lost both of his parents, in a span of a few months, to cancer. At the time, he had an 8-year brother, Christopher (Toph). Despite having older siblings (his brother Bill and sister Beth), Dave took up the task of taking care of Toph. The siblings sold their parents' house in the Chicago suburb. Dave, Toph, and Beth moved to Berkeley, California. The book, purportedly, is an account of the life of Dave and Toph in a period of about four to five years after the move. The book, the literary construct of it, has four, somewhat weakly linked, often interlaced but not necessarily in chronological order parts: Part 1 is where Eggers depicts, often in grim (and gross!) detail, the last days of his mother's life, lying on the living room couch, waiting to die. The uncontrollable nose bleed, and copious spitting of her deteriorating lungs, in the form of green and yellow mucus, into a half-moon-shaped bin, and so on. Part 2 deals with the rearing of Toph, the transformation of Eggers into a single parent when he was barely of legal drinking age, the parent-teacher conference, the morbid worry about the baby-sitter molesting his brother when the author was about town and wanted to sleep with a sexologist, his own residual need to have a pillow fight or WWF tryout with Toph, and their constant forays into the town, parks, highways, to see the Naked Man, to throw frisbees, to think about sleeping with a student's parent (Dave only). Part 3 is the part the detractors hate the most. It involves Dave Eggers's fantasy, philosophizing, Gen-X angst expressed in sick humor, etc., all rolled into a mock interview with a MTV talent scout for the program "Real World." It also contains the short life and death of the magazine Might, as the author and a few friends undertook the Quixotic task of changing the world. Part 4 is the closer where Dave goes back to Chicago and finds his mother's ash (his mother, pursuant to her will, was made an object of scientific research after her death) and spreads it into Lake Michigan. To these four parts, I must add the preface and appendix, "Rules and Suggestions For Enjoyment of This Book," "Preface to This Edition," and "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making." Let's call the amalgam of these Part 5. Once broken thusly, the book, which Dave Eggers himself judges to be "uneven", avails itself for further comments and ratings. Part 5 is a must-read for anyone literate. It is here that Eggers came closest to being a genius. It is outrageously funny, sickly hilarious, and not without wisdom. This is basically where the psyche of Gen-Xers lies. However, even this part of is "a kind of uneven," for you can skip the "Mistakes We Knew ..." assured in the knowledge that you haven't missed any gems. The second best is Egger's narrative of his relationship with Toph, their various adventures and conversations, the occasional comedy and frustration. This is supposed to be the heartbreaking part of the book, but it is not. It is funny, too. It has a touch of sadness, but in an indirect way. Either one is dumb enough to have sympathy-by-conceptual-association for all orphans, or smart enough to detect subterranean messages, often buried in Eggers' over-eager showmanship, to be funny, to be cool, to be ironic. I cannot say the author did anything noteworthy that would help one understand better; but it's sure entertaining. The other three parts are what Chinese metaphorize about such things: "The great wave washes the sand, pearls and eyeballs of fish mix and mingle." It is more than uneven; it's a roller-coaster, more downs than ups. Part 1, as said, is gritty. But it is also pointless. At least the author doesn't establish, with this reader, the sympathetic cord for me to feel sad or stricken by the episode. Besides the unnecessary Naturalist slant, Eggers spoils the part with excessive joking. Desperate humor is one thing, making fun of one's dying mother is another. I don't recommend this part strongly. Part 3, the MTV interview and surrounding events, while putting a kaleidoscope to a Gen-Xer's mind, how it functions, how it is influenced by the pop culture, how young people of today go about "teamwork." It offers the occasional insight, but a lot of verbiage and, as the detractors justly criticized, "look-at-me" narcissism of the 90's. I recommend a patient read of this section, not to be too jarred by Eggers' sometime unbearable need to be the wise guy and droning repetitions. Part 4 is very weak. There is almost nothing I can recommend. The author clearly ran out of steam, or was pushing against a deadline. There is nothing that comrade Jiang Ze-min cannot write, when the Chairman is in a Chairman Mao mood, in comparable Chinese. So unless we are a fan of Mr. Jiang ... Overall, Dave Eggers is undisputably a talented writer, with a keen eye for the funny side of human affairs, dexterous with words, savvy in things that interest or sell. He apparently has a good story to tell, but didn't tell it as well as he (or a more mature person with comparable sheer talents) could. What hampers him is his apparent confusion of cleverness with wisdom, his inability to map out a way, and maintain the discipline, to convey a central message, and his ill-formed world-view, this I am on my limb to diagnose, that everything is a joke or joke is everything. This commentator has been known to be a joker-at-all-costs. It is a minor miracle that he has managed to use Eggers to reflect on himself. Haha, very funny.
Rating:
Summary: A Loving Tribute to Wayne Newton
Review: Eggers' masterful account of the recording of Wayne Newton's classic "Danke Schon" is a critically acclaimed work of beauty. If you have not already read Eggers' analysis of such mythic figures as Tom Jones and Sigfried and Roy, do not miss this latest entry in the classic Vegas series. His dry wit, sarcasm and Bond-like good looks (check out that author photo, ladies!) will inspire a cultural epiphany in any reader. Eggers is so witty and sarcastic in his descriptions of dalliances with white tigers and making jelly rolls with Newton at his ranch that you may have dry heaves from laughter. I have a friend who actually died from laughter reading this book, (memorial donations can be sent to the American Cancer Society), and I'm sure Mr. Eggers would also laugh at the irony of that statement. He is so creative that he has manufactured over 450 reviews instructing potential buyers that the book is about a young man raising his brother in San Francisco, and that it involves water and Danny Bonaduce, even writing hundreds of his own negative reviews. This is just another example of Eggers' pervasive and wonderful wit. Buy this book, and rejoice over a Gold Dutch treat.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding, hardbreaking, simply marvelous!
Review: Dave Eggers is an extraordinary writer...his story is both heartbreaking and charming...it made me understand the world of my sons, truly and absolutely, and I want to thank Dave Eggers for opening my eyes and heart!!!
I love that generation of the Xers they are true to their spirit and Dave Eggers reminds me so of the very best and the most creative...
Rating:
Summary: Too much self absorption
Review: Eggers book demonstrates strong writing, an eye for charming detail, a certain insight into the human condition; however, where it fails is in delivering a coherent story. For me for a story to work it must have some plot. This story does not. After pages and pages of self referencing his self referencing through a looking glass of infinite mirrors, the book becomes tedious. There's no denying eggers has talent. I just wish he'd have used some of it to build a story and not a long series of sometimes witty and sometimes perceptive monologues on the exact state of his psyche at any given moment.
Rating:
Summary: Oh, what it could have been
Review: Hi, Dave Eggers here, and I've been through this really great tragedy, and you think I mean "great" as in tremendous, but I mean "great" as in isn't it cool, because, you see, if my parents hadn't died then my book would really be about nothing and would really be intolerable and would never have gotten published. OK. Well. But since they died, and I became largely responsible for my darlin' little bro', I can write hundreds and hundreds of pages about my life because there's some real tragedy there, yeah. We're orphans. ORPHANS I say! So what? Well that makes us so very special. I mean, I'm only in my early 20s, I can barely handle such responsibility, but I am such a stud to take it on, to carry the world on these shoulders of mine. What's that? Other 20-somethings get married and have babies at my age and have real jobs and have dealt with death and dying and all sorts of other yucky things? WELL . . .
Re: the title -- presumably Eggers' tongue is in cheek, but not quite firmly enough, for my taste. Yeah, he's a good writer, very good, but I think this book was rushed. And it's usually best if people don't write memoirs until middle age. I look forward to his next book, after he attains some real world (not "Real World") experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Splendidly frustrating
Review: This book is both exhilarating and exasperating. There are passages so beautiful that you'll weep, and sections so self-indulgent and annoying that you'll want to throttle Mr. Eggers-or at least toss his book across the room. But then again, isn't that a realistic portrayal of a person's life? Particularly a twenty-something person's life? We don't always have poignant things to say, and we don't always act without self-interest. Sometimes we are selfish and bratty and think unnaturally highly of ourselves. So, read this book. Just don't expect to like the narrator all the time. He'll tick you off sometimes, just like the folks you know.
|
