Rating: 
Summary: The cutting edge of literature
Review: Warning: This book is not an easy read!But then again groundbreaking literature never has been... This is not for those who think that the personal essay is the only kind of essay there is or who think The Liars Club is an exemplar of great nonfiction or that last year's outrageously hyped Dave Eggers is what an experimental nonfiction writer might look like. This is for those readers who want to be challenged on every level of the reading, whether about the subjects the book treats or the styles it employs or the huge disarming issues it raises about the very nature of genre. In general, for anyone who wants a glimpse at what essayists a decade from now will be writing, you must definitely read this amazing first book! And if you get a chance to hear him in person read from this do it! I just heard this dude perform at my friend's school in Massacusetts and it was completely transportaive! Read it!
Rating:
Summary: A Young Prince of Genres
Review: You'll spend some time scratching your head as you read this book, wondering whether it's nonfiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, fantasy or some amalgam of them all. Then, at about half way through, you'll stop caring, because at this point you'll have reached the book's title section, "Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter," a not entirely unironic meditation on the 3000 some-odd halls of fame in the United States which acts as both investigative journalism into some particular places the author has visited (there's a hall of fame of "Suffleboard" and a "Burlesque" hall of fame, for example) and personal meditation on the author's own family discord that is never quite clearly expressed but instead lingers overhead making all of these journeys into the halls of fame of America a very desperate, lonely, heartbreaking act. I have no idea if these "halls" are poems (they look like poetry at least) nor what in the book is real and what imagined (there's an interview with the so-called president of the Flat Earth Society, for example) but I think the ambiguity of the book's forms is intentional, and meant to mask--or maybe even illustrate--an uncertainty in the world that this very mournful but simultaneously witty author feels deep in his bones. This is a tremendous book that is going to change the way essays are made from now on. Or, if these in fact aren't "essays," it will at least change something in American literature.
Rating:
Summary: What the Essay Can Do
Review: What the essay can do is this: "Halls of Fame"--a book that I think changes everything in the field that people call "nonfiction." Forget about melodramatic memoirs with fancy sequined blinders on or investigative journalism that's as formulaic as the New Yorker's past 500 issues or critical expositons on mundane intellectual trinkets, "Halls of Fame" by John D'Agata is as "fact" driven as all of those forms but as entertaining as a circus. (A bad analogy, but there in fact truly is something circus-like about the subjects D'Agata pursues and his attempts to combine them oddly, juxtaposing at times the absolutely absurd with the wonderfully sublime.) I've been waiting for a writer to turn our attention back to the disciplined sensibility of the classic American essay; this guy does it by taking tradition of the essay and spinning it anew for the 21st century. If you love nonfiction and want to know where it's likely to be heading, I recommend this book more strongly than anything else out in this genre at the moment.
Rating: 
Summary: To the World: I Accept Your Challenge
Review: It seems pretty clear that the world has gone insane, since this is in fact the WORST book ever written in nonfiction, instead of what the insane reviews on here are calling the best. So from now on, every good review that this book gets I am going to counter with a negative one. It seems only fair for a book that is not only unreadable but that has copied better efforts by better writers, which has been camoflaged with lots of "experimental" techniques that are neither experimental nor very technically able. John D'Agata is overrated, untalented, and the least informed writer of his generation. These aren't essays, but just masterbatory effects.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Essays but OK
Review: There are two duds in this book, the one about a college in the dessert, that I'm not sure even exists, but whatever, and the one about museums. But after that I think it's an intersting twist on what 'essays' mean. okay
Rating:
Summary: Judge the book on its own terms
Review: Let me give you the scoop on John D'Agata. I am a student of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. Before I came I made a point to read everyone's books. I haven't had John D'Agata as a teacher and haven't even seen him yet because he's a freak and a hermit. But this is what I think about his "brilliant" book. Halls of Fame is D'Agata's first book, and you can tell it is. Now that the love fest with him seems to be over, I hope people will be willing to think about this book intelligently. It is a waste of paper. And definitely a waste of money. His "essays" ,if that's what you want to call them, are just hodge podges of bits of information and "observations" that are about as profound as a bowell movement. Just because a guy uses some "experimental" styles while writing in a conventinoal form doesn't make him a "breakthrough!" Get with it people. This is not a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Halls of Me Me Me Me Me Me Me!
Review: I discovered this book last semester in a course called Border Genres. It's categorized as "essays" but it's really a work of philosophy. Really excellent! He's not interested in thesis statements like most essays, he wants to make this form a creative genre. I recommend it a lot!
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