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Summary: F- Fantastic
Review: d'Agata is a rare, real thing.
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Summary: Guess I'm Too Late
Review: Hey, World.I worked up a whole slew of things to say here, but looks like there are enough now, so let me just say that the book rocks. I could be more sophisticated, but really: Who's going to read this? G
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Summary: Wouldn't Mind Having Some of That
Review: Suddenly I'm feeling tipsy and all over covered with an excitement for the world of the unknown and the lowly and the highbrow. I feel like I want to go eat at a greasy spoon and read Eliot at the same time. I feel like I'm getting the point and totally not. This is a book that is doing what non-fiction used to do when Annie Dillard was writing it , for instance. The book comes at you from out of nowhere, its voice like none other I've encountered. The author, "from a beach in New Hampshire" (does New Hampshire HAVE any beaches???) seems at times to be more at home with the great dusty classics of literature, but then suddenly gears shift--or they don't shift--and he's interviewing a greasy technician who changes the lightbulbs on the world's brightest light, and you realize that the guy is actually interested in this lightbulb changer, that the man's deep concerns are not fodder for some intellectual escapade but simply incredibly interesting. If this new over-educated generation of "MFA" graduate writers (and D'Agata has--count 'em--two) are truly going to be the next set of voices for the American experiences, I'm glad there's at least this guy. D'Agata has the hyper-intelligence, but it's subtle. What he has above all that makes this book so mysteriously touching, is wonder.
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Summary: Best Nonfiction this year
Review: In the world of nonfiction the book stands out as a testament to what is possible. Deftly experimental without being alientaing, John D'Agata's debut is a song to everything this genre can and hopefully will soon become once it emerges from the age of memoir. The short sentence-long essay "Notes on the Making of Whole Human Being" is one of the very best examples of subject dictating style. "Flat Earth Map" is itself a map. And "Collage History of Art" is not only one the best biographies of psycho artist Henry Darger but one of the best examples of collage ever.
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Summary: simply extra ordinary
Review: skip the first and last, dive as deep down into the middle vers one, and savor, for as long as possible, the remaining four.
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Summary: Makes me think of
Review: Borges, as if everything Borges had imagined were actually coming true on these pages.
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Summary: obessive, dreamy, lyrical & hyper-intelligent
Review: john d'Agata's 'Halls of Fame' is categorized as a book of essays, but it is often difficult to discern for the close reader what is, in fact, observed and what is imagined. dreamlike, mysterious, funny. poignant, emotionally charged yet somehow also evocatively distant, d'agata's voice combines all these adjective. he is an new yet already essential literary and philosophical presence. this book is a ramble through the many cultural icons of american pop culture that often get overlooked these days for the very fact that they are icons. it's a thinker's tour of the built landscape of the country, full of philosophical, psychological and historical digressions each triggeredd by everything d'agata sees and experiences on his journeys into these now-rarely visited pockets of society. filled with colorful and sometimes mysterious and disturbing images and emotional suggestions, the book is fundamentally, i believe (but many would argue with me) a self-exploration of the author's own thoughts and experiences. his digressions, although spurred by his observations, are tonally deeply felt, which must suggest a pain or joy behind them that can only be real and authentic. this effect, as purely essayistic as you can get, is like being in d'agata's mind for the course of the book--a mind experiencing reality, dreaming illusion, speculating on death and love, literature and art, and time. d'agata represents the the most faithful attempt of his generation to use the imagination to connect the life of the mind to the world.
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Summary: Why I Love this Book but Hate Its Author
Review: The book's better than anything I've read this year, the dude's probably a genius, and according to two friends he's supposedly dating Nora Jones.
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Summary: a new essayist to save the essay
Review: Brushed with a tone that wants to say more than it's saying, D'Agata's style in this startling and daring debut is absolutely evocative. It evokes the kind of captivating immagination and descriptive abilities that announced Annie Dillard's debut with the observational talents that made Joan Didion an immediate master of the sly journalistic essay. (Dillard blurbs the book on the cover, which suggests that there is more than just a stylistic connection there.) But there's something else in D'Agata's work that sets him apart from his literary models. At its core this book is concerned foremost with a new artistic role for the essya in contemporary literature. His bio says he's trained as a poet, and the sentences show it. Complex, sometimes challenging, always melodic, the sentences in this book, no matter what they are describing, are the kinds of sentences that suggest that this writer is here for the long haul. You cannot open the book up and expect to be entertained, as many of these reviews suggest you can. His subjects are absolutely hilarious--ie, the flat eart society, deep springs college, las vegas, and other American absurdities (no offense!)--but that isn't his main objective in this book I think. "Halls of Fame" is a book about longing. We never find out what the longing is for (for better or worse--but I personally think it makes the book more mysterious, and evocative...to use that word again!) but at turns it seems that it's a world of wonder, of dreaming and imagining and creating that this journeyer is after. A world that he tries to capture with the essay. Again, it's a hard book, but all of its difficulties pay off. It's life may only be within the world of scholars, it's true. but this authors life I bet will soon burst out into the mainstream. So watch out! Very highly recommended.
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Summary: it's the essay let out of a cage
Review: this is the book that has opened my eyes to what essays can do. we've just finished reading it for class and it was the pinnacle of everything we've studied. this is probably my favorite book at the moment.
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