The Braindead Megaphone

In a serendipitous moment, someone sent me an e-mail quoting from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's recent non-fiction book, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable": "Note that art, because of its dependence on word of mouth, is extremely prone to these cumulative-advantage effects... Our opinions about artistic merit are the result of arbitrary contagion even more than our political ideas are. One person writes a book review; another person reads it and writes a commentary that uses the same arguments. Soon you have several hundred reviews that actually sum up in their contents no more than two or three because there is so much overlap..." George Saunders' latest book, a collection of reportage and satirical pieces that first appeared in popular magazines like "The New Yorker" and "GQ", has received kudos from other popular magazines and newspapers ("Entertainment Weekly", "Vanity Fair", and "The Boston Globe") for his wit and intelligence, and has appeared on the David Letterman and Stephen Colbert shows. Thomas Pynchon calls Saunders "graceful, dark," and Zadie Smith declares that "Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny." Saunders does not match the blurbs, and this book does not warrant the extravagant media praise. He's not Twain, and his prose isn't going to last. The praise raises the questions posed by Curtis White in "The Middle Mind" (2003), a critique of cultural studies and much else: "Since when do we have to put up with ethical diatribes from columnists for GQ? Is that where all the decent folk have gone?" However, Saunders is very good in a small clutch of essays. Let's get the misfires out of the way first. They are: "Thank You, Esther Forbes" (a dull piece on an inspiring teacher - a moratorium of at least four decades on this topic would be welcome), "A Brief Study of the British" (an unfunny riff on the ignorance someone from the US displays about the UK), "Nostalgia" (a laboured piece about how sex and violence were regarded 'back in the day'), "Proclamation" (based on Iranian laws about the importation of foreign words), "Woof: A Plea of Sorts" (interior thoughts of a dog - also deserving a moratorium), "Thought Experiment" (advocating acceptance over non-judgement, a worthwhile concept, but not written with much verve), and "The Perfect Gerbil" (about Donald Barthelme's story "The School," and here I admit to a bias against Barthelme). Some pieces rise a bit above the poorest: "A Survey of the Literature" ("fluid-nations," like People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction, replacing such a thing as the United States, which is amusing, though familiar), "Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra" (Saunders' literary awakening at the age of twenty-three thanks to "Slaughterhouse Five", which has fine closing paragraphs about war), "Ask the Optimist!" (a demented version of an advice column), and closing the book, "Manifesto: A Press Release from PRKA" (in which a group claims responsibility for not committing violence

This book is really funny - if you like David Sedaris, you will love this! Tammy at [...]

Insightful and funny at the same time. No one should miss this. I hadn't read anything by Saunders until my son told me about him. Like Sterling, as far as social and scientific commentary is concerned, he's way ahead of the curve. Not only that, he's extremely funny. I'm a voracious reader, especially science and science fiction. If you've never read George Saunders, this is the one to begin with.

This is very, very funny stuff with stong a ring of truth that leaves you thinking. I loved it and highly recommend it.

For the title essay alone, this is the nonfiction book of the year. Saunders coins this term "The Braindead Megaphone" for our mass media and the circus its made of everything from the OJ Simpson Trial to the War in Iraq - and how we end up thinking and talking about such events, from the most ridiculous to the most serious, in equivalent terms. Both the term and the essay are pretty much right on, and eminently useful...And you have to keep in mind that Saunders is hands down the funniest writer in the business - funny like Stewart or Colbert, but smarter and more humane, less of a shtick. BUT that essay is just the beginning. What follows is a series of essays that are basically the antidote to everything he diagnoses at the beginning - if the media is deadening us, Saunders finds ways to end-run it: he travels to the Middle East, to the Mexican border, and to Nepal, and he tells his stories with the expected charm and humor, but also with a surprising insight and honesty (I never thought he would admit to LIKING the Minutemen he meets - but it makes the whole essay so much more effective when he does). All told, it's just a brilliant book - exactly the book we should all be reading. It's not heavy-handed and it's so much fun to read, but it made me take events in the world more seriously, made me take a fresh look at things, made me think about how I treat people. Wow, that sounds really hokey, but it's true. It also made me laugh a lot.