The Best American Essays 2004

After reading the book, the above comments are quite accurate. I would just like to point out, as it already has been, that the "my 80's" essay was included for purely personal reasons. After reading excellent quality essays like "The last Americans" & "Passover in Baghdad" & to then get dragged through "On TV I saw Brideshead Revisited and the Patrice Chereau production of Wagner's Ring...and then "Sometime in the mid-'80s I stopped swallowing cum. I don't miss its taste". Nothing inherently wrong with that, I guess, but I submit not one of the best American essays of 2004. Sorry, call me low brow. "My Lost City" & "My Fathers a Book" make it worth buying. Thank you.

"The Best American Short Stories" may be more popular, but "The Best American Essays" anthology is an even better choice for readers seeking the utmost in nourishment for the brain. The twenty-two selections chosen by Louis Menand, which cover a wide variety of topics, are all exceedingly well written, mind expanding, and, to a high degree, personal, in that they reveal something about the author as well as the subject matter. In spite of the two minor flaws of Menand's selections (discussed below), this collection will definitely reward the reader seeking substantive reading material. The two most powerful essays in the book are two of the most personal. Kathryn Chetkovich's "Envy" pulls no punches in her analysis of how she reacted to the success experienced by her boyfriend and fellow writer, Jonathan Franzen, who rocketed to literary stardom in 2001 with "The Corrections". Interestingly, Chetkovich doesn't name Franzen, but Menand chose also to include an essay by him ("Caught"), which, although interesting, doesn't have the same emotional depth or power as Chetkovich's essay. The other extraordinary essay in the collection is Laura Hillenbrand's "A Sudden Illness", which describes her incredible struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Her personal story is every bit as poignant as the story of the racehorse Seabiscuit, which she chronicled in her best-selling book. Other essays of note, I feel, include Luc Sante's "My Lost City", which actually celebrates the crime-ridden, graffiti-covered, anarchic, decaying, pre-Rudy Giuliani New York of the 1980s, and Oliver Sacks' "The Mind's Eye", which describes differences in the extent to which several blind people use visualization techniques, thereby illustrating the power of (and structural differences among) human brains. As for the minor complaints: Menand openly admits, "I like to read stories about my own times." This bias shows up most obviously in the inclusion of an essay by a CUNY colleague of Menand's: Wayne Koestenbaum's "My `80s" will likely not at all resemble your `80s unless you are a NYC opera buff who kept up with the cutting edge of male homosexual intelligentsia literature. The other complaint is that a small number of essays exhibit the stereotypical upper West side salon superior-than-though attitude which sneers at red state values and culture (e.g. Fox News). Of course, if you are of a similar opinion, this won't bother you a bit. However, one essay takes this attitude to completely illogical extremes: Jared Diamond's "The Last Americans", which somehow claims a linkage between Enron's financial shenanigans and global warming (hey, it's all George Bush's fault, right?). Diamond's essay will leave some readers fuming and others shaking their heads, while still others applaud, but it will cause all readers to think, as do all the essays in this collection. Thus, Menand has created a collection well worth spending the time to read and ponder.

As a longtime fan of the Best American Series, I have a few suggestions for the editors: 1) Change "American" to "English Language" so that you can include the outstanding essays that appear in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and beyond; and 2) Don't forget to consider the great essays that appear in online publications such as Slate.com and Salon.com. In spite of these omissions, the 2004 issue of Best American Essays is excellent. The range is broad - these essays are all over the place, from Susan Orleans's amusing visit to a taxidermy convention to Kathryn Chetkovich's confession of jealousy of her boyfriend's (the never-named Jonathan Franzen) success as a writer. Two of the essays were written decades ago, one by Tennessee Williams and one by James Agee, but newly rediscovered in 2004. Jared Diamond and Oliver Sacks are informative yet readable as usual and well worth your time. One of my favorites was an off-the-wall essay about knitting from the Harvard Review by Kyoko Mori. I have never knitted and would not have thought that an essay about yarn could be so entertaining.

Seven of the twenty-two essays collected here are from The New Yorker, no big surprise, but overall this is, in terms of subject matter, style, and tone, a diverse collection. Here are some highlights: 1. "Envy" by Kathryn Chetkovich. In this autobiographical essay, Chetkovich, an obscure short story writer, chronicles her romance to Jonathan Franzen who with his novel The Corrections becomes a publishing phenon, making her consumed with guilt for experiencing, against her own will, envy. She combines narrative with a sharp analysis of the causes and effects of envy in her life and shows how the condition is a universal one. 2. "Caught" by Jonathan Franzan. Franzan writes about his high school years as a misfit trying to find belonging among the hipsters by challenging authority and the icons of authority. An amazing feat, he writes a comical narrative combined with a penetrating analysis of the pitfalls of adolescence. 3. "A Sudden Illness" by Laura Hillenbrand. The author of the famous nonfiction book Seabiscuit which was made into a hit film, the author traces the origins of a consuming fatigue disease for which no real specific diagnosis can be found. The result is a lack of sympathy from others and a heroic struggle for which she somehow, as a sort of miracle, wrote Seabiscuit. 4. "The Last Americans" by Jared Diamond. Diamond compares our piggish, consumer-obsessed country with other fallen empires and refutes the fallacies and misconceptions that afflict us: our dismissal of the environment as a crucial part of our survival; our blind faith in technlogy to cure all our woes; our tendency to demonize environmentalists as extremist crackpots who are overstating their catastrophic predictions. 5. "Against Cool" by Rick Moody. Denying that he is cool, Moody, in a sneaky rhetorical technique, proves just how cool he is by giving us a thorough, definitive, and historical definition of cool. 6. "Arrow and Wound" by Mark Slouka. Somehow Slouka takes an ambitious, philosophical theme of human suffering, mortality, and our intuitive ability to prepare for our agony and makes the theme both accessible and readable, quoting Kafka, Dostoesvsky, and the poet Jaroslav Seifert and weaves their philosphical ruminations into a frightening and bizarre narrative he experienced.