A review by siria
Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word by Toni Morrison

2.0

Pretty tiresome. I liked Pico Iyer's and Nadine Gordimer's essays, but this was largely an uneven and self-congratulatory collection. Francine Prose's contribution made me roll my eyes—her writing had a tendency to confuse barely-developed ideas and smug questions for gnomicism. Ed Park's was inane. No one, it seems, ever told John Updike that his personal experiences and feelings are not necessarily universal—I found his essay infuriating, positing as it does that everyone ought to feel about writing the same way as he does. Still, I suppose the time spent reading this slim volume saved me from spending much longer slogging through the novels of some of the writers featured here.