Reviews

The Best American Essays of the Century by Robert Atwan, Joyce Carol Oates

klaws500's review

4.5

An excellent anthology of 20th Century American thought. 

beckysee's review

I'm not going to rate this because academically, I'm sure it should receive a much higher rating than I would give it for enjoyment purposes. We only had to read about half the essays for class, and my favorite one by far was No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston. I probably won't end up coming back to these essays unless I have to for another class.

mattycakesbooks's review

5.0

With relatively few exceptions, there wasn't anything in here I didn't enjoy... Oates did a solid job of selecting not only the best essays, but also essays from a wide breadth of American life. Plenty of women, plenty of writers of color, articles on war, articles on poverty, articles on immigration, articles on culture, articles on science, articles on the environment, and all while staying pretty geographically diverse.

There are, of course, the less impressive articles, the ones that hit me the wrong way or struck me as pretentious, but for every one of those, there were three or four that were brilliant.

vdarcangelo's review

4.0

Faves:

Mark Twain: "Corn-pone Opinions"

Henry Adams: "A Law of Acceleration"

John Muir: "Stickeen"

William James: "The Moral Equivalent of War"

Randolph Bourne: "The Handicapped"

Jane Addams: "The Devil Baby at Hull-House"

H.L. Mencken: "The Hills of Zion"

F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The Crack-Up"

Tom Wolfe: "Putting Daddy On"

Vladimir Nabokov: "Perfect Past"

Michael Herr: "Illumination Rounds"

Joan Didion: "The White Album"

Gretel Ehrlich: "The Solace of Open Spaces"

Edward Hoagland: "Heaven and Nature"

Stephen Jay Gould: "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown"

zezee's review

challenging informative inspiring

annawilhelm17's review

4.0

I enjoyed a lot of the essays I read last semester, from Bourne to Didion, so I decided to take a deeper dive over break. A lot of these were delicious! I couldn’t believe I had missed out on “Stickeen” until now, and “Looking for Zora” and “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” were a couple of my other favorites.

sputnik2057's review against another edition

challenging emotional funny informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

kennedym10__'s review

challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

3.0

suzukimom4's review

4.0

Read in Spring 2010 and in Spring 2012

iceangel9's review

informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

A collection of essays from 1901-1997 by such authors as Mark Twain, W.E.B. DuBois, T.S. Eliot, John Muir, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. Well worth the time it will take to read through the entire collection.