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A review by trilobite
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 by Dave Eggers
4.5
The bulk of this anthology is superb. Some of the short stories that really stand out are:
- Neil Gaiman's "Orange" --- a police interview with a teenaged girl whose sister uses an experimental dye as a self-tanning cream
- Anthony Doerr's "The Deep" is the BEST piece in the collection and likely the best short story I've ever read. The story is about a boy with a heart condition growing up in Detroit in the decade before the Great Depression. Each sentence is practically a work of art in this piece. This story can also be found in the paperback version of Doerr's book Memory Wall - a recent collection of his short stories. I ordered both of his short story collections after reading "The Deep."
- Sloane Crosly has a humorous story about visiting a friend in Paris.
- Joyce Carol Oates has a story about a cosmetic surgeon's harrowing encounter with female patients who are swept up in a cultish desire for trepanation as a spiritual procedure.
I wrongly assumed this anthology consists solely of short stories, as there are several essays also included. My favorite essay is Mac McClelland's, "For Us Surrender is Out of the Question." McClelland, a human rights reporter for Mother Jones magazine, traveled to Mae Sot, Thailand to volunteer to teach English to a group of Karen (pronounced "kuh-REN") activists in Thailand who risk their lives bringing to light the atrocities committed in the military dictatorship of Burma.
Adama Bah has an essay originally published in Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice documenting her arrest and detention by the FBI in 2005 when was 16 years old. She had been attending an Islamic boarding school in Buffalo, New York and was back in Manhattan with her family for Ramadan break when a dozen armed FBI agents came to their East Harlem apartment and arrested her and her father. She spent six weeks in detention and then lived under partial house arrest for three years with an ankle bracelet and a court-issued gag order that prohibited her from speaking about her case. She was suspected of "signing up to be a suicide bomber" simply because she had joined a women's study group for converts and people new to Islam at a mosque in Buffalo.
William Deresiewicz has a piece that was actually a speech he delivered to a plebe class at the US Military Academy at West Point. I almost skipped this piece entirely because I'm not really into military things, but I decided to read it due to an interview I read about a year ago with anti-war activist and West Point graduate Paul Chappell, in which Chappell revealed that he was exposed to Noam Chomsky's writings at West Point.
Deresiewicz, taught English at Yale for ten years and has written for The Nation and is a contributing editor at the New Republic. He speaks about the necessity for solitude in order to learn to think for and find yourself. He compares steady exposure to facebook, twitter and other forms of media as "continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people's thoughts" which prevent one from hearing their own thoughts. He draws from Joesph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness and encourages his listeners to read books as a form of solitude, adding that a book has two advantages over a tweet: the person who wrote the book thought about it more carefully than a tweet is thought about and the book is the result of the author's solitude -- the author's attempt to "think for himself."
James Spring's "Mid-Life Cowboy" originally aired on This American Life is his true story of his journey to Baja Mexico to work as an independent bounty hunter on a whim.
Also notable was a lovely comic/illustrated story about a Jewish rug-makers day at an old country market by James Strum.
There were a few stories that didn't grab me, but over all this anthology is solid.
- Neil Gaiman's "Orange" --- a police interview with a teenaged girl whose sister uses an experimental dye as a self-tanning cream
- Anthony Doerr's "The Deep" is the BEST piece in the collection and likely the best short story I've ever read. The story is about a boy with a heart condition growing up in Detroit in the decade before the Great Depression. Each sentence is practically a work of art in this piece. This story can also be found in the paperback version of Doerr's book Memory Wall - a recent collection of his short stories. I ordered both of his short story collections after reading "The Deep."
- Sloane Crosly has a humorous story about visiting a friend in Paris.
- Joyce Carol Oates has a story about a cosmetic surgeon's harrowing encounter with female patients who are swept up in a cultish desire for trepanation as a spiritual procedure.
I wrongly assumed this anthology consists solely of short stories, as there are several essays also included. My favorite essay is Mac McClelland's, "For Us Surrender is Out of the Question." McClelland, a human rights reporter for Mother Jones magazine, traveled to Mae Sot, Thailand to volunteer to teach English to a group of Karen (pronounced "kuh-REN") activists in Thailand who risk their lives bringing to light the atrocities committed in the military dictatorship of Burma.
Adama Bah has an essay originally published in Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice documenting her arrest and detention by the FBI in 2005 when was 16 years old. She had been attending an Islamic boarding school in Buffalo, New York and was back in Manhattan with her family for Ramadan break when a dozen armed FBI agents came to their East Harlem apartment and arrested her and her father. She spent six weeks in detention and then lived under partial house arrest for three years with an ankle bracelet and a court-issued gag order that prohibited her from speaking about her case. She was suspected of "signing up to be a suicide bomber" simply because she had joined a women's study group for converts and people new to Islam at a mosque in Buffalo.
William Deresiewicz has a piece that was actually a speech he delivered to a plebe class at the US Military Academy at West Point. I almost skipped this piece entirely because I'm not really into military things, but I decided to read it due to an interview I read about a year ago with anti-war activist and West Point graduate Paul Chappell, in which Chappell revealed that he was exposed to Noam Chomsky's writings at West Point.
Deresiewicz, taught English at Yale for ten years and has written for The Nation and is a contributing editor at the New Republic. He speaks about the necessity for solitude in order to learn to think for and find yourself. He compares steady exposure to facebook, twitter and other forms of media as "continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people's thoughts" which prevent one from hearing their own thoughts. He draws from Joesph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness and encourages his listeners to read books as a form of solitude, adding that a book has two advantages over a tweet: the person who wrote the book thought about it more carefully than a tweet is thought about and the book is the result of the author's solitude -- the author's attempt to "think for himself."
James Spring's "Mid-Life Cowboy" originally aired on This American Life is his true story of his journey to Baja Mexico to work as an independent bounty hunter on a whim.
Also notable was a lovely comic/illustrated story about a Jewish rug-makers day at an old country market by James Strum.
There were a few stories that didn't grab me, but over all this anthology is solid.