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oodlesofbooks's review against another edition
5.0
These essays are so beautiful some left me in tears. I find some of the ones about trains and trucks and what not boring but the ones about nature and the Maine farm are bucolic and perfect. I love how he speaks of everyday life in an extraordinary way. Some of his essays on pollution and hydrogen bombs are relevant and unfortunately still necessary 70 years after being published. How can someone be so timeless. He is extraordinary.
mjanssen's review against another edition
5.0
There's no excuse for not having read this much, much sooner. When I wasn't laughing at White's dry humor, I was marveling at how incredibly well-crafted each sentence was, each turn of phrase. Nearly every other page featured a passage that I wanted to copy out or add to my Goodreads quotes. I did skip a few essays that seemed dated or didn't interest me, but almost every other one was a gem, including his account of a trip to Alaska, his reflections on life in rural Maine, his elegy for the railroads, and his appreciation of Thoreau's Walden. I hope to return to this review someday and write more about White's greatness, but until then, just read this!
juliepjones's review against another edition
5.0
excellent, excellent, excellent... especially the parts about the city and the farm. I'm not much into politics, so I skipped over that section. Maybe I'll come back and read those parts when I don't have to be so selfish about my time.
nenobeano's review against another edition
4.0
A pleasant read. E.B. White is a master at making the mundane interesting.
levibaus's review against another edition
4.0
I didn't read all the essays, but I read some, skimmed others, left the rest for my next visit of this volume. I appreciate White's voice and his style. Several of the essays were inspiring and provided insight for how to write some of my own essays.
jackwwang's review against another edition
4.0
This book has fully convinced me that some cursory research into the biography of the author is almost always time well-invested before starting into a book. I read the first couple of essays in the collection without doing this homework, and found the prose incredibly... dull. The author's voice seems meandering, dancing around the point and never quite making it. White seems to have a special disdain for the high school writing adage that one should begin with the thesis, elaborate, then restate the thesis.
Thankfully I decided to spend a bit of time getting to know EB White's biography and reputation. It turns out he was a notoriously shy individual. White seemed to have cultivated a quiet, kind, sensitive professorial reputation while helping to build the New Yorker up to the institution it is today, and writing his three masterful works of children's literature. His life also took him from a Westchester childhood to Cornell, to New York, and then to a farm in rustic Maine that inspired the animal characters of his children's books. John Updike's anecdote of one encounter seems to encapsulate the essence of the man, his reputation for reticence, and a sharp but understated sense of humor - "Standing next to E. B. White, one is imbued with something of the man's fierce modesty, and one's sentences haltingly seek to approximate the wonderful way his own never say more than he means. Whereas Thurber's humor bore a trace of the tyrannical, a wish to impose confusion from above, White's seems to stem from an extreme of attentiveness that would grant to things the graceful completion they lack in reality. Once I barged through a door in The New Yorker offices, and powerfully struck an obstacle on the other side; White had been hurrying down the hall, and stood there dazed. Reading in my face my horror, my fear that I had injured this sacred and fragile person, this living embodiment of the magazine's legend, he obligingly fell down as if dead."
After getting a sense of the man, I realized I needed to read these pages with patience and quiet, in the same way that I would have a conversation with a thoughtful and funny but painfully shy man. Once I got into this mindset, the beauty of White's essays and prose revealed themselves to me. It's true he does tend to dance around what he is saying in each essay, he is never so crude as to spit it out in the first page, but his tangential introductions serve a purpose. In his meditation on the newly-arrived nuclear age and the crudities of modernity ("Coon Tree"), he started with an extended anecdote about a family of raccoons who lived in a tree, and looking back the story captures something ineffable about the atavistic sentimentalism that is essentially the central point he's making.
Especially apparent in his essays on his farm life in Maine is a deep appreciation of the beauty in the banal. White is a romantic and sentimentalist (he is a man who once wrote that “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around.”), but his quiet and carefully crafted sentences and paragraphs makes the sweetness of his sentiments bearable.
Also notable is his love letter to New York ("Here is New York"). Although he acknowledges the mercurial nature of the city - the city one year is not the same city the next year - White succeeds in capturing something essential to the idea of New York. As someone who has lived in and loved the city for six years, New York does indeed "bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy," and as a transplant, my New York is indeed "the city of final destination, the city that is a goal... [that] accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements."
White's ventures into politics however, fall flat for me. His piece on world government "Unity" feels hopelessly quaint and out of touch. This may be partly due to a change in the times, but it's likely that his politics came off just as naive and utopian in his time as it does today.
Although, sentimentally I do agree with his critical ethic towards the reckless and unthinking brand of capitalism that seems to have taken hold in many parts of the west. There's one especially lovely and scathing paragraph that also manages to tickle the funny bone:
"Our [Maine's] whole economy hangs precariously on the assumption that the higher you go the better off you are , and that unless more stuff is produced in 1958 than was produced in 1957 , more deer killed , more automatic dishwashers installed , more out - of - staters coming into the state , more heads aching so they can get the fast fast fast relief from a pill , more automobiles sold , you are headed for trouble , living in danger and maybe in squalor . If that theory is sound , Maine won’t be in a solid position until we kill at least forty million deer and with a good prospect of making it fifty million the following year . But that would be the end of the wilderness , and without its wilderness Maine would feel awfully naked."
The introduction hails White as the greatest essayist that America has seen. I can't say I know the competition well enough (or at all for that matter) to just the degree of the this overstatement, but these essays are remarkable in their quite and careful craftsmanship, their shy humor, and their understated insights.
Thankfully I decided to spend a bit of time getting to know EB White's biography and reputation. It turns out he was a notoriously shy individual. White seemed to have cultivated a quiet, kind, sensitive professorial reputation while helping to build the New Yorker up to the institution it is today, and writing his three masterful works of children's literature. His life also took him from a Westchester childhood to Cornell, to New York, and then to a farm in rustic Maine that inspired the animal characters of his children's books. John Updike's anecdote of one encounter seems to encapsulate the essence of the man, his reputation for reticence, and a sharp but understated sense of humor - "Standing next to E. B. White, one is imbued with something of the man's fierce modesty, and one's sentences haltingly seek to approximate the wonderful way his own never say more than he means. Whereas Thurber's humor bore a trace of the tyrannical, a wish to impose confusion from above, White's seems to stem from an extreme of attentiveness that would grant to things the graceful completion they lack in reality. Once I barged through a door in The New Yorker offices, and powerfully struck an obstacle on the other side; White had been hurrying down the hall, and stood there dazed. Reading in my face my horror, my fear that I had injured this sacred and fragile person, this living embodiment of the magazine's legend, he obligingly fell down as if dead."
After getting a sense of the man, I realized I needed to read these pages with patience and quiet, in the same way that I would have a conversation with a thoughtful and funny but painfully shy man. Once I got into this mindset, the beauty of White's essays and prose revealed themselves to me. It's true he does tend to dance around what he is saying in each essay, he is never so crude as to spit it out in the first page, but his tangential introductions serve a purpose. In his meditation on the newly-arrived nuclear age and the crudities of modernity ("Coon Tree"), he started with an extended anecdote about a family of raccoons who lived in a tree, and looking back the story captures something ineffable about the atavistic sentimentalism that is essentially the central point he's making.
Especially apparent in his essays on his farm life in Maine is a deep appreciation of the beauty in the banal. White is a romantic and sentimentalist (he is a man who once wrote that “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around.”), but his quiet and carefully crafted sentences and paragraphs makes the sweetness of his sentiments bearable.
Also notable is his love letter to New York ("Here is New York"). Although he acknowledges the mercurial nature of the city - the city one year is not the same city the next year - White succeeds in capturing something essential to the idea of New York. As someone who has lived in and loved the city for six years, New York does indeed "bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy," and as a transplant, my New York is indeed "the city of final destination, the city that is a goal... [that] accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements."
White's ventures into politics however, fall flat for me. His piece on world government "Unity" feels hopelessly quaint and out of touch. This may be partly due to a change in the times, but it's likely that his politics came off just as naive and utopian in his time as it does today.
Although, sentimentally I do agree with his critical ethic towards the reckless and unthinking brand of capitalism that seems to have taken hold in many parts of the west. There's one especially lovely and scathing paragraph that also manages to tickle the funny bone:
"Our [Maine's] whole economy hangs precariously on the assumption that the higher you go the better off you are , and that unless more stuff is produced in 1958 than was produced in 1957 , more deer killed , more automatic dishwashers installed , more out - of - staters coming into the state , more heads aching so they can get the fast fast fast relief from a pill , more automobiles sold , you are headed for trouble , living in danger and maybe in squalor . If that theory is sound , Maine won’t be in a solid position until we kill at least forty million deer and with a good prospect of making it fifty million the following year . But that would be the end of the wilderness , and without its wilderness Maine would feel awfully naked."
The introduction hails White as the greatest essayist that America has seen. I can't say I know the competition well enough (or at all for that matter) to just the degree of the this overstatement, but these essays are remarkable in their quite and careful craftsmanship, their shy humor, and their understated insights.
austra_pro's review against another edition
4.0
E. B. Vaits ir viens no ASV slavenākajiem un mīlētākajiem esejistiem, un varu piekrist, ka tas ir pelnīti. Raksta viņš ļoti labi un par ļoti dažādām tēmām, sākot no vistu olu krāsu popularitātes līdz izmirstošajai vilcienu satiksmei un tam, kas padomā Krievijai (Aukstā kara laikā, bet - tā reāli nekas jau nav mainījies). Viņam piemīt gan dziļums, gan veselīga pašironija - abas patīkamas īpašības.
“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.”
“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.”
shoelessmama's review against another edition
4.0
Most of this collection I loved but there were a handful that bored me to tears. For those few I will knock this down a star. Overall an excellent collection. Some of my favorites: Death of a Pig, The Eye of Edna, Coon Tree, The Geese, Bedfellows, Here is New York, The Ring of Time, Once More to the Lake, The Sea and the Wind That Blows, and A Slight Sound at Evening.
julied's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
5.0