Rating: 
Summary: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Self Indulgence
Review: Mr. Eggers apparently learned nothing about being or becoming a human being from his experience. I hope his little brother faired better than he. This book was nauseating in it's glibness, chaotic in it's prose and boring in it's length. I don't understand how the Eggers' could be seen as heroic. Frankly, I see them as just plain sad and out to make a buck. A definite...MUST NOT READ!
Rating: 
Summary: I finished it...
Review: Did Eggers write this confessional because he didn't make it onto the Real World? He just wrote a book and found a publisher to expose his each and every thought? Ick.In spots it was sincere, but basically proved to me why I am not ready to write myself--what does a 20-something really have to say that could be of any import to anyone but himself? It reads like a Real World episode, addictive but essentially exhibitionistic claptrap.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely astounding
Review: Some people understand. Some people don't.
Book after book and movie after movie has been manufactured to mirror the lives of Baby Boomers back to them. As a GenX kid, I have read and watched countless examples of this. Let me say that, if you are a Vietnam Vet or Hippie, I have heard enough from you. I have heard your story. It's wearing thin and growing old. I have taken of you as a cannibal of the dead, and nothing is left for me to eat. Finally, a man of our generation is brilliant enough to give something back to the American, flesh-eating ecosystem. You'll see. This book is for those who understood the line in Fight Club: Our Great War is a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives.
It's also for those who are open-minded enough to learn.
Rating: 
Summary: Clever sometimes, genius ... well, no
Review: I give big points to Eggers for taking great and wonderful liberties with the traditional format of the autobiography. He inserts himself into unlikely places like the copyright page, kicks tradition in the spine with his Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book, and gallops along at a good pace for about 200 pages. There is a lot of truth and horror in the scenes leading up to the death of his parents; as well, there is a universal, inarguable truth to the fear he expresses for his little brother Toph when, for example, Dave has a sitter in to look after the boy in order to have a night out with his friends. The perennial fear that the sitter might be putting your kid in the microwave or doing something equally bizarre and horrible is a very real fear that most parents have had at some point. But then the prose maunders along and falls into a trough with the "imagined" interview with MTV and stays there, seemingly, forever. From that point on, the book just becomes harder and harder to read, filled as it is with something perilously close to self-indulgence. Some judicious editing (which, perhaps, the author fought off) might have resulted in a better book. But patently that fact is irrelevant, given the enormous success of the book. And it's often hard to take issue with success, it is, often, its own reward; regardless of how flawed the work might be. I would recommend this overlong book only for those with limitless patience. It becomes, finally, an effort in determination just to get through it. After all the media coverage, I had expected more, but got less than I had hoped for.
Rating:
Summary: Odd, but interesting
Review: This is a very unusual book, written in an odd style that is, in the end, rather effective. It's easy to tell that a lot of the conversations in this "non-fiction" work never happened, for some of the sentences supposedly coming out of the mouth of the author's young brother are absolutely impossible to imagine. Interestingly, the author admits that much of this work is thoroughly overwritten and exaggerated, for whatever reason. This book is a big best seller, which makes me wonder what people see in it to compell them to purchase. I liked reading it, but I think that I probably would not have bought it (probably because of the pretentious title) if it hadn't been as commercially successful as it has. I got it just to see what all the hoopla was about. I'm happy I bought and read it, for under all the artifice and affectation is a real, honest "heartbreaking" story, even if I don't believe there is any "staggering genius" accompanying it.
Rating:
Summary: A Pageturning Work of Staggering Self-Importance
Review: This book was both More and Less than I had hoped for.
More: For starters, this memoir-disguised-as-a-novel is thoroughly groundbreaking. Replete with all the bells and whistles of postmodern literature (self-awareness, meta-fiction, hypertextuality, etc.), Eggers tinkers with the art of narration and with the art of plotting, both to what I thought was a very positive effect. He is not quite a normal person, and this comes across clearly in his stuttering, self-analyzing, emotionally volatile voice. In short, he is easy to like (despite his loathing of nearly everyone around him, which itself is offset by his occasional desire to hug a whole generation at once). His story is indeed heartbreaking and exhilarating, and this makes it a quick read as well.
Less: Sometimes Eggers' insatiable egotism is hard to take. The only thing that made this tolerable for me was the fact that he would pause every so often to point out how big an egomaniac he can be (often through the voice of another character). Also, his style, while fascinating and new, could have been toned down in sections (the 50-page section containing a mostly made-up interview for MTV's The Real World was bold in concept but self-indulgent in execution). I must add that while I thought the preface and addendum were brilliant, Eggers is so in love with the sound of his own voice that he couldn't help but to include sections that had been edited out of the body itself. A seasoned writer could have told him that nearly anyone can write a story if given enough pages, but that it takes true skill to edit and intelligence to know what to leave out.
All in all though, a fascinating read from a writer with great skill and even greater potential. I look forward to his next.
Rating:
Summary: Neither "Heartbreaking" nor "Staggering"
Review: I did something with this book that I rarely do anymore: buy it based on literary reviews, as opposed to reviews by my peers as posted on Amazon. I wanted to like this book - I really did. I found the preface very funny. The humor sort of reminded me of watching a Monty Python episode - wacky, stream of conciousness, completely silly, poking fun at established convention. Even the copywrite page has jokes buried on it. I thought I was in for a real treat. Unfortunately, the humor & insight demonstrated in the Preface appeared only in brief passages throughout the body of the book. Egger's style is original, different than anything I've ever read, but it gets old after awhile. He goes to great lengths to inform his readers how he feels and what he thinks, but he fails to let us know why we should care.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic writing though some moments are uncomfortable
Review: This is a well reviewed memoir of a hip twenty-something who is forced to raise his young brother after both of his parents die. Unfortunately, something about Eggers didn't sit well with many people in my book group. I suspect it was the fact that he was behaving quite irresponsibly for someone raising a child. Many in the group seemed to disturbed by this (since many of us have small children). I really enjoyed the book unlike most of the group. Eggers is able and willing to delve into some uncomfortable places in his own mind that few authors are willing to go. He illuminates aspects of our voyeuristic culture by examining his own need for people to observe his life. Many of his actions are clearly designed to gain him notoriety. He nearly says as much while interviewing for a spot on MTV's 'The Real World'. This desire to be noticed is a driving force throughout the book. Yet the tragedy of his parents' deaths helps to keep the book centered. Without this tragedy, Eggers' humor and confidence might overwhelm the story. As it is, it balances his more unbearable tendencies. The book itself is very good, yet the foreword and the addendum added to the paperback version are excellent and very funny. I enjoy going back even now to read those parts. Eggers discusses the small details surrounding the publishing of his book and how things have changed for him and his friends since the success of the book. For example, he had originally published the real phone numbers of several of his friends in the first edition. After they got a few phone calls, they asked Eggers to take them out of the book. They told him they hadn't thought anyone would read the book, so they let him use the numbers. Eggers description of this and the multitude of other comedies in his life add a lot to the work overall. Don't skip these parts even though he tell you to. They are worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: a good potboiler
Review: That's all it is, a good read and nothing accomplished at the end. It may be a true story, but it's also an amalgam of Woody Allen movies, Nick Hornsby, and the hacknyed bonding between brothers theme. All you rustics who like this book might say "this is so heartfelt, humerously sentimental" blah, blah, blah. Eggers is a conceited SOB. Skip this and read something more original.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book
Review: People claim to accept that "life isn't fair" while secretly assuming the really bad stuff with be reserved for somebody else. That youthful sense of invulnerability helps coax us out of our cribs and into battle with the real world. But when a life-altering tragedy does occur, we're pushed into a different realm of awareness. All bets are off and anything can happen. Dave Eggers captures the landscape of that realm perfectly. Since something unthinkable has taken place, his most horrifying fantasies seem not only possible but probable. He'll be murdered, his little brother kidnapped and molested. One minute he feels doomed; the next he's grasping at life with manic determination. Is the loss of his parents a tragedy, a cosmic joke or just something that happened? Eggers hurtles through the confusion like a runaway train by turns romanticizing his situation and regarding it with a detached irony more befitting his Gen-X sensibilities. It's sad that someone so young has this kind of story to tell, but lucky for us that he's articulate enough to express so much sorrow, humor and truth.
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