Rating: 
Summary: A great adventure!
Review: I started and failed to read this book several times beforefinishing it. Once I did, I was sorry I waited so long to dive intoit. While I was at first intimidated by the mathematical references, wordiness and abstract concepts of the first essay, once I got into it I enjoyed every word (or artifical word created by Wallace). I found the absurd references, made-up words, footnotes, and insightful descriptions of people's natures to be refreshing and thought-provoking. The last essay is particularly rich. I would definitely recommend this work to anyone wanting a bit of an intellectual stretch. Not that the concepts are difficult, just that the style takes a bit of getting used to. But it is definitely worth the effort!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Everything I could want in a book.
Review: Sadly, I can't write like David Foster Wallace. The silver lining : I can read what he writes.Get this book. Keep the Webster's on hand. Take frequent breaks. The utterly hilarious (and wonderfully true) review of the Illinois State fair is worth the price of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: DONT BUY THIS BOOK
Review: This author couldn't write himself out of a paper bag. David Foster Wallace has absolutely no sense of humor about the trivial subjects he writes about and actually takes himself seriously. Sometimes it's ok David to take a step back and laugh a little at the absurdities of life. Too critical, TOO MANY FOOTNOTES, and downright boring. It's more entertaining to read the back of a box of cereal. Stay away from this book if you know what is good for you.
Rating:
Summary: A Ge
Review: When David Foster Wallace is really fires up the jets and hits his comic rhythm, it is--literally--exhilarating: it's the giddy intellectual equivalent of being tossed around in a Moon Bounce. His eye for the incongrous and bizarre in the everyday is almost nonpareil, and when paired with his scary mastery of the American vocabulary and deliciously direct wise-acre humor, you get a one-of-a-kind cross between Pynchon and either Chris Rock or that punk in your sixth grade homeroom that continually cracked everyone up. I liked this book a lot--it had the relaxed air of a virtuoso playing a few silly tunes at a party for friends. Like Yo-Yo Ma coming over, having a beer or three, and then playing a ridiculously ornate version of "Swanee River." Of the seven essays, the shortest--a brief review of a book that allows him to flex his meta-fictional muscles--is disposable, and his account of being thrown across a tennis court during a tornado is riveting for the story alone but not worth revisiting. But the rest of it is aces, with two stunning highlights: the title essay, in which Wallace goes on a sea cruise at the behest of Harper's and finds the whole thing a complete existential nightmare (lucky for the reader,) and a reasoned but very passionate dissection of the way post-modern irony (aided by TV) could be cutting off the artistic cojones of potential literary visionaries. Yes, I admit, you have to have a dictionary around. But I have to say--so fricking what? Wallace is clearly enamored with language and communication, and his vocab conjury feels very right-on in the context of his Homer-Simpson-Avant-Lit fusion because you cannot question the man's fire for pushing the limits of the English language. It's there on every page, even the ones with the most questionable experiments (his toying with the word "like"--like, you know, like--feels particularly unnecessary, as do some of the famed footnotes.) If you don't share his geeky, passionate fever for the written word, don't bother; but for me, it draws a line in the sand, and I'm very, very happy to stand on his side in a time when most writers just seem to draw circles around themselves. I highly recommend this book of essays to anyone who wants to find out what side they prefer.
Rating:
Summary: Unique
Review: Wallace has a vocabulary that puts ordinary human beings to shame. I have to say that I think he goes on (and on and on and on) about certain subjects in these essays, but his slightly skewed perspective is refreshing in many ways. Wallace manages to be hip without being overly cynical; educational without being preachy; and intelligent without being artificially academic. I'd recommend this to anyone who is looking for something a little different.
Rating:
Summary: Above-average belly-laugh-to-verbiage ratio.
Review: This collection, like Wallace's other work, requires a great deal of indulgence on the part of the reader, but those who can overlook (or even appreciate) DWF's neuroses will find an honest and trenchant wit. These funny, sincere, intelligent, and occasionally even warm essays will delight lovers of telling detail and (sometimes overly) frank authorial openness. Be forewarned that Wallace writes from a very particular angsty East Coasterly intellectual positionality; if you find existential dread utterly foreign, this book will be too.
Rating:
Summary: Not Ironic- a struggle to be truthful
Review: Like other reviewers of this book, I laughed a great deal while reading it. Like others, I ejoyed the fact that Wallace can walk the tightrope of the long, multi-comma'ed sentence and make it to the other end having said something completely new. But I don't think any "Amazon" reviewers of this book has really gotten the point of this work- Which is this: Sure DFW has all the "throwing in everything but the kitchen sink" trappings of a Gen-x writer (a-la Leyner or Copeland) but he has a very different, and, most importatnly, non-ironic outlook on the word that distinguishes him from others of his time. Unlike many of this "Seinfeld" generation, Wallace is happily unafraid to express joy and pleasure in mere things. (Where so many of his generation are afraid to let their emotional guard down, lest they be thought of as uncool.) He didn't enjoy cruising in the same manner as others, granted, but this is not becuase he is a cynical misanthrope- rather, he seems to truly love thinking, exploration, and life- and the cruise, he finds, is a thing that seems to deprive him of these things. I felt DFW's joy in the unusual, the difficult to explain (he tries) and the unique (which plucks from the most unexpected places..) Witness his descriptions of finding a manner in which he could turn to his advantage his experience with the excessive wind on Midwestern tennis courts and how he likens this to a kind of mathematical game that is pleasurable by sheer virtue of the fact that it is complex, yet can be grasped. The eponymous essay of the book is, above all else, about the struggle to figure out what the heck he really thinks about what, to him, is a very foreign and disconcerting experience. Thus, the joy of reading Wallace is the joy of watching a wandering and witty mind struggle to see and express what others don't - or, differently put, struggling to understand and write down what one is really feeling and thinking, rather than what the tools and conventions of our language and culture make us most readily say about things. There is a reason Wallace has chosen the disjointed "footnote" style: it reflects his thought process. He himself is finding out, right there on the page, what he thinks; and what it is is not straightforward or easily explained. His view cannot be expressed directly. How boring, how untruthful, a direct decscription of a luxury cruise it would have been had he found it either totally "relaxing" or totally "hateful." Instead, through his labaryinthine mental wanderings, DFW, and we the reader, find a complex middle ground full of small pleaures and overriding neurosis and joys- which sticks together by the common thread his his point of view. Like a complex flavor, the trip he takes us on leaves our minds strugling, pleasuably, to assimilate all the we and he see. And, cliched as it may sound, our wanderings through life are much like this. I recieved a great abdominal workout (laughing) from this book, but I was also deeply touched at Wallace's struggle to finding meaning in a world viewed through over-educated eyes. Wallace has broken through the post-modern glass window that keeps us at an ironic distance from things- but, at the same time, does not fall upon the hackneyed past. I hope this work inspires others.
Rating:
Summary: Funny and thought provoking
Review: Like some of the other reviewers in this space, I had some trouble with some of Wallace's idiosyncrasies (the footnotes, strange abbreviations), but it was all well worth it. The title essay alone is well worth the price of admission, and there are some other classics mixed in here. His style does require some patience, but you'll be rewarded.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst thing I have read in a while
Review: Wordy and drawn out are two terms to describe this overbearing work by Wallace. It wasn't enertaining as much as it was tedious to get through. Footnotes, Lynch essay from hell, "banal", and "w/r/t" all overdone. The only redeaming essays are about the state fair and the cruise, where we the reader gain insight into the author's way of perceiving mundane aspects of life. But I suppose we could all be watching Seinfeld reruns instead. I will admit I skipped quite a few paragraphs in this book because the inane prattle was driving me insane. My advice, leave this one on the shelf.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliance dulled by self-absorption
Review: I'm positive David Wallace Foster has the skills to write an expressive 17-syllable Haiku but I bet he couldn't do it with less than 10 footnotes. His mastery of language and incisiveness are frequently breathtaking, but in this collection are often blunted by his wordiness and his solipcism. E.g., if it doesn't matter, as he tells us, that he gets shellacked at chess by a 9-year-old, why do we have to read about it? I found the overlong eponymous essay, with the contant interruptions a/k/a footnotes especially irritating. (PS and I'm a DWF fan.)
|
