Rating: 
Summary: What happened!?
Review: I just finished reading this book and put it down thinking, "What the hell just happened?" Literally. So this kids parents die, and the entire book is written from an "I need to articulate everything" perspective, meaning that everything the character thinks you, as the reader, get to read about. Unfortunately it's not all that interesting. I don't believe that this is a great work of talent. It was interesting, yes, but I wouldn't recommend it. Maybe I didn't catch the symbolism, but the characters did not progress enough, nor was there any climax or denoument. And the conclusion lacked. Don't recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This book had a great first act, but then dwindled into postmodern gimmicks. There is only so much masturbation you can read before you want to throw the book into the fire.
Rating: 
Summary: Emotional Roller Coaster
Review: This book had me on an emotional roller coaster for the two weeks it took for me to read it. Dave Eggers breaks your heart more than once. In the end, though, it was well worth it. He has a good ear for dialogue, and what's more important, a good heart.
Rating: 
Summary: One of My New Favorites
Review:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the topsoil of a tragedy, the first layers of earth pushed aside in a painful personal excavation, where the treasure seems to remain deeply buried.
This first book by author Dave Eggers is a memoir. Eggers tells of the years following the deaths of both his parents - deaths which occurred within 5 weeks of one another - and how, at the age of 21, he became his younger brother Toph's guardian.
Eggers uses a highly self-conscious style of writing - confiding his fears of his own early death, terrors that something untoward will happen to his brother, or the sensations of his own flapping genitalia when running naked for a photo shoot. But his utter preoccupation with here-and-now mundanity or with imagined future horrors are but his shield against the true conscious experience of his own grief.
Although the story of AHWOSG rests upon the tragic reality of parental deaths, ironically there is no mourning. There were no burials, no gravestones, no remains to be grieved over. Soon after these deaths, Dave and Toph move from Lake Forest, IL to Berkeley. Dave nominally ensures that Toph is fed and clothed and schooled, but without embodied parental authority, "in a world with neither floor nor ceiling," the two live in semi-anarchy, enjoying the freedom to eat junk food and drive to the beach and play frisbee whenever the impulse might strike.
Unable to see logic in his parents' deaths, he sublimates his need for order and justice into the making of a magazine, Might. The mission of Might is to take "a formless and mute mass of human potential and...to mold it into a political force." This counter-cultural magazine is designed to be both provocative and empowering, but over time it becomes more shocking and in-your-face. Eggers's own rage and grief remain unresolved and become expressed editorially in Might, so much so that Toph asks him about his work "Where does anger like that come from?"
His failure to grieve his mother's death head-on is carried to his subsequent relationships with women. Girlfriends fade away inexplicably. Eggers does not react to his sister's marriage, a symbolic separation from family. The story line of the sudden, unexpected death of a minor female character dead-ends.
Eggers's failure to give us his grief directly in these pages is not a literary failure. The writing is strong and compelling. He is at his best when writing manic stream-of-consciousness passages about his fears of his mother's imminent death, his terror of having lost Toph at a hotel, his panic when accompanying a suicidal friend to the hospital. Here he is intimate and immediate, observing the profundities of possible death side by side with the ordinary details of television, of the slowness of elevators, or of the Conan O'Brien show. During these passages, one cannot read fast enough.
Throughout the book, Eggers repeatedly gives us passages wherein he and Toph toss a frisbee to one another. There is beauty and delight in keeping this little plastic disc afloat, keeping it soaring and sailing through the air. As long as the frisbee stays flying, there is hope, they are happy children, and they are immortal. This game of toss connects these brothers in a mythical mutual immortality.
Toph seems to serve as Eggers's talisman of hope, a beacon to the future where the past is too painful to confront. Beyond all the irony and self-consciousness (and looseness of the writing), AHWOSG is a wonderful book, certainly one worth picking up. Beside AHWOSG, another (much shorter, rougher) Amazon quick-pick I enjoyed is THE LOSER'S CLUB by Richard Perez -- a book I can't stop thinking about since I picked up a "used" copy.
Rating:
Summary: I really wanted to enjoy this book...
Review: ...but it just wasn't going to happen. See, this book had been sitting on my shelf for over five years. I finally decided to give it a go, but damn, I couldn't get through it. I only read half the book.I agree with many of the reviews on here that say that Eggers is too sincere, and too self conscious in his writing. He just goes on and on and on, with no real focus. This gets to be very tiring and boring. It doesn't make for an enjoyable read at all. I feel like he's rambling to get to a point, but he never really does. He has these moments of brilliance, where he's very funny, or the way he describes something can be so beautiful. Sadly, I can't say the rest of the book is like that. Another thing about this book is how disjointed it was. I didn't realize his mother had died in the hospital, and then the next thing I know, he's talking about driving around in California. The change is very abrubt, and it took me a while to say, 'Oh, his mother died...and they moved to Cali, I get it now!'. I shouldn't have to question what the hell has happened. Or the 'interview transcript' where it takes a turn, and you realize it's fake. It took me a while to realize what was going on. It's an annoying little thing Eggers does. I applaud those people who were actually able to get through this book. I could not, unfortunately. Eggers has an awesome potential to him, but he needs to edit his work. Sorry Dave, but I really did have high hopes for this book of yours. But did you have to make it so tiring?
Rating:
Summary: A seminal work in 1990's literature
Review: It's all in the title my friends. Pay no attention to the negative reviews unless you are without a heart and/or sense of you humor in which case, heed every word.
Rating:
Summary: Too much of a bad thing - too many pages and nothing to say
Review:
Consider this: if you want to read a book about a true story of losing one's parents, David Eggers will give you that and much more. The problem is the much more - lots of thoughts that just sit in there with no connection to the rest of the book whatsoever.
The author undoubtedly went trough a great tragedy, losing his
parents in such short time. But this fact by itself does not make a great story. And, by the way, nothing else in this book does.
Is a writer allowed to write whatever crosses his mind? Sure. But does it make good literature? I doubt. I got the
feeling that the reviewer was so sorry for the author that (s)he felt the author's "healing" through the publication of the book would be worth the extra pages. Not worth for the reader, though.
By the way: nothing against well written prose and loose ends - try instead Kazuo Ishiguro "The Unconsoled". Lots and lots of loose ends, superbly written and no agression against the reader.
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