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cemoses's review against another edition
2.0
Maybe I am old fashioned but when I think of "essay" I think of Francis Bacon or Charles Lamb. I think of essays nonfiction writings with a literary goal.
This collections I would called memoir/"creative nonfiction".
This collections I would called memoir/"creative nonfiction".
bougies_et_etoiles's review
3.0
This collection of American essays from 2013 reveals the true essence of the American people in its rawness, and ends with unforgettable morals that stay with the reader.
lizzderr's review
4.0
A really solid collection overall. Standouts for me were Alice Munro's "Night," Vanessa Veselka's "Highway of Lost Girls," Kevin Sampsell's "'I'm Jumping Off the Bridge,'" Angela Morales's "The Girls in My Town," Zadie Smith's "Some Notes on Attunement," Tod Goldberg's "When They Let Them Bleed," Megan Stielstra's "Channel B," and Steven Harvey's "The Book of Knowledge"--nothing like ending a collection with a gut-punch!
balletbookworm's review
5.0
Very readable. Interesting how each made me think of something in strayed's work and appreciate how her preferences worked when choosing pieces for the book.
rbreade's review
I have some brief notes on several of the essays here, though I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. "His Last Game" is, I think, my favorite.
"The Girls In My Town" -- Angela Morales, Southwest Review
Structured by 13 numbered sections. Set in Merced, California, in the valley between the Sierras and the coast; the town has a significant Latino population. Morales devotes section 1 to a description of the town, especially its depressed economy and moves in like manner through sections about a boy in her composition class who is a likely candidate to impregnate one of the eponymous girls and leave her to care for the baby by herself, the prevalence of meth in the area, the local Teen Parent Program, Morales' own experiences being pregnant (at 32) in the same town with so many teenage mothers, the sad and horrifying legend of La Llorona as well as one of Llorona's real-life counterparts in Merced, and ends with Morales' thoughts about her daughter, now 14, and the daughter of a teenage mother who gave birth on the same day as Morales: what has life been like for that other girl, now 14 as well? What are her chances of overcoming economics and family history?
"Sometimes A Romantic Notion" -- Richard Schmitt, Gettysburg Review
Begins when a member of the writer's department mentions that his grandfather "ran off" to join the circus. Schmitt has fun with this phrase, and uses his 10-years of life in the circus to describe how virtually impossible it is to "run off" and join the circus. Gradually widens to analyze how preposterous and unlikely romantic notions are when seen in reality and why we cling to them anyway. Slightly anticlimactic ending when he draws a parallel to his own romantic notion that fiction writers "simply [make] things up out of thin air," rather than finish on the idea of romantic notions as anodyne to banality, or some similar conclusion.
"His Last Game" -- Brian Doyle, Notre Dame Magazine
Powerful three-page essay. Doyle and his brother, in their fifties, drive to the pharmacy for his brother's prescriptions but take a meandering route by an arboretum and stop at a park at dusk to watch a 3-on-3 pickup basketball game. The capsule descriptions of each player are little gems. Then, in the midst of the hoops analysis, including a bet made on the game, this: "You owe me a dollar. We better go get my prescriptions. They are not going to do any good but we better get them anyway so they don't go to waste. One less thing for my family to do afterward. That game was good…." The essay pivots on that sentence and a sadness that the reader sensed but wasn't sure of begins to seep into the tone. The closing paragraph is perfect.
"When They Let Them Bleed" -- Tod Goldberg, Hobart
Tod works outward from November 13, 1982, when as an 11-year-old he watched the Ray Mancini-Duk Koo Kim bantamweight title fight, which ended with Kim in a coma from which he would die within days. He alternates analysis of the boxing culture at the time, the coverage of boxing in Sports Illustrated, with his home life at the time, his habit of cutting himself, his mother's live-in boyfriend--one of those people who manage to be horrible without committing any crime--and his mother's death 28 years almost to the day after that of Kim.
"Pigeons" -- Eileen Pollack, Prairie Schooner
Pollack revisits her old elementary school after four decades, and explores the memories it conjures: the different expectations for girls and boys, especially where math was concerned, and how frustrating she found this double standard; the school psychologist and how utterly he failed to understand elementary-age children; the casual use of corporal punishment to maintain order, especially in the case of the black students. She is haunted by one particularly brutal incident that she accidentally caused: "I watched in horror as he tugged Walter by the ear into that dreadful belfry--the darkroom, I suddenly thought--and we listened to the sounds of a grown man throwing a boy half his size against a wall."
"Highway of Lost Girls" -- Vanessa Vaselka, GQ
Harrowing account of her years as a teenage runaway, circa 1985, her survival mechanisms hitching rides from truckers, the extraordinary misogyny of that culture and that culture's role as a sort of petri dish for cultivating serial killers. The stats are terrifying: "In 2009 the feds went public with a program called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative in response to the rising number of dead bodies found along the interstates….Narrowing the field to those last seen around truck stops and rest areas, the bureau counted over five hundred bodies, almost all women. Of the two hundred people on a suspect list, almost all of them were long-haul truckers." Vaselka details her effort to see if her most chilling hitch was with incarcerated serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades. The answer, though not definitive, is probably "yes."
"The Exhibit Will Be So Marked" -- Ander Monson, The Normal School
This wonderful example of an essay with associative structure begins with a mix-CD project Monson launched for his 33rd birthday. One of the offerings he receives is a micro-cassette without a case from an anonymous source and the essay follows his attempt to fix the cassette and listen to it, as well as to figure out who sent it. In doing so, it ranges across Nebraska City, Nebraska, the differences between desert and semiarid environments, fruit tree grafting, the Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, a Belle & Sebastian cover of "Sweet Home Alabama" at an Atlanta concert, and more. He does hear what's on the tape and figures out who sent it, by the way.
"Some Notes on Attunement" -- Zadie Smith, The New Yorker
Smith contrasts her openness to the new and to change in fiction with her resistance to the same in music, taking as a case in point her "not getting" Joni Mitchell until, suddenly, she did, at Tintern Abbey, of all places. She analyzes this epiphany and in so doing calls on Wordsworth, Seneca, what it means to be a connoisseur, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and Mitchell's wariness of being pigeonholed by the expectations of her audience.
"Free Rent At the Totalitarian Hotel" -- Poe Ballantine, The Sun
Documents Ballantine's time in Eureka, California during the late 1980s, right when the stock market crashed in 1987. Sharply observed details of life among his artists friends, all of them poor, contrasting the panicked speculations among pundits about what the crash might mean with how little the vanishing of so much phantom money meant to people who had almost no actual money.
"Epilogue: Deadkidistan" -- Michelle Mirsky, McSweeney's
Mirsky, who works for a children's hospital advising its administration and doctors on what it's like being the parent of a patient, describes the year her own young son, Lev, was a patient there, his death, and the two years following. She does an excellent job; the experience is exactly as awful as you imagine it must be.
"The Book of Knowledge" -- Steven Harvey, River Teeth
His parents' purchase in 1952 of the ten-volume Book of Knowledge, and specifically his mother's use of it to fill in perceived gaps in her education after the family moved from Kansas to a suburb of New York City, is the springboard for Harvey's essay. He uses this set of encyclopedias as well as a cache of family photographs--photographs he didn't look at for 50 years--and letters his mother wrote to her own mother, to understand his mother's suicide when he was twelve.
"Keeper of the Flame" -- Matthew Vollmer, New England Review
Describes a recent outing with his father, a dentist, to visit a patient on a social call in the man's Blue Ridge Mountain castle. The man, whom Vollmer's father refers to as "the Nazi"--though the man might or might not actually sympathize with the National Socialist agenda of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s--has built an actual castle in southwestern North Carolina and gathered a unique collection of World War II German Army artifacts. The visit is eerie; Vollmer can't bring himself to ask any of the questions that might discover whether the man is simply an odd collector or is an actual Nazi sympathizer, and the man is coolly noncommittal during the entire visit. Vollmer then gets a surprise when the man opens a ledger with the names of hundreds of SS officers and places his finger on one name: Vollmer.
"He didn't say, 'See, you do have Nazis in your family.' He just tapped the name with his finger. It was as if he wanted this--the fact that people with the same surname as ours had served under Hitler--to sink in on its own."
"The Girls In My Town" -- Angela Morales, Southwest Review
Structured by 13 numbered sections. Set in Merced, California, in the valley between the Sierras and the coast; the town has a significant Latino population. Morales devotes section 1 to a description of the town, especially its depressed economy and moves in like manner through sections about a boy in her composition class who is a likely candidate to impregnate one of the eponymous girls and leave her to care for the baby by herself, the prevalence of meth in the area, the local Teen Parent Program, Morales' own experiences being pregnant (at 32) in the same town with so many teenage mothers, the sad and horrifying legend of La Llorona as well as one of Llorona's real-life counterparts in Merced, and ends with Morales' thoughts about her daughter, now 14, and the daughter of a teenage mother who gave birth on the same day as Morales: what has life been like for that other girl, now 14 as well? What are her chances of overcoming economics and family history?
"Sometimes A Romantic Notion" -- Richard Schmitt, Gettysburg Review
Begins when a member of the writer's department mentions that his grandfather "ran off" to join the circus. Schmitt has fun with this phrase, and uses his 10-years of life in the circus to describe how virtually impossible it is to "run off" and join the circus. Gradually widens to analyze how preposterous and unlikely romantic notions are when seen in reality and why we cling to them anyway. Slightly anticlimactic ending when he draws a parallel to his own romantic notion that fiction writers "simply [make] things up out of thin air," rather than finish on the idea of romantic notions as anodyne to banality, or some similar conclusion.
"His Last Game" -- Brian Doyle, Notre Dame Magazine
Powerful three-page essay. Doyle and his brother, in their fifties, drive to the pharmacy for his brother's prescriptions but take a meandering route by an arboretum and stop at a park at dusk to watch a 3-on-3 pickup basketball game. The capsule descriptions of each player are little gems. Then, in the midst of the hoops analysis, including a bet made on the game, this: "You owe me a dollar. We better go get my prescriptions. They are not going to do any good but we better get them anyway so they don't go to waste. One less thing for my family to do afterward. That game was good…." The essay pivots on that sentence and a sadness that the reader sensed but wasn't sure of begins to seep into the tone. The closing paragraph is perfect.
"When They Let Them Bleed" -- Tod Goldberg, Hobart
Tod works outward from November 13, 1982, when as an 11-year-old he watched the Ray Mancini-Duk Koo Kim bantamweight title fight, which ended with Kim in a coma from which he would die within days. He alternates analysis of the boxing culture at the time, the coverage of boxing in Sports Illustrated, with his home life at the time, his habit of cutting himself, his mother's live-in boyfriend--one of those people who manage to be horrible without committing any crime--and his mother's death 28 years almost to the day after that of Kim.
"Pigeons" -- Eileen Pollack, Prairie Schooner
Pollack revisits her old elementary school after four decades, and explores the memories it conjures: the different expectations for girls and boys, especially where math was concerned, and how frustrating she found this double standard; the school psychologist and how utterly he failed to understand elementary-age children; the casual use of corporal punishment to maintain order, especially in the case of the black students. She is haunted by one particularly brutal incident that she accidentally caused: "I watched in horror as he tugged Walter by the ear into that dreadful belfry--the darkroom, I suddenly thought--and we listened to the sounds of a grown man throwing a boy half his size against a wall."
"Highway of Lost Girls" -- Vanessa Vaselka, GQ
Harrowing account of her years as a teenage runaway, circa 1985, her survival mechanisms hitching rides from truckers, the extraordinary misogyny of that culture and that culture's role as a sort of petri dish for cultivating serial killers. The stats are terrifying: "In 2009 the feds went public with a program called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative in response to the rising number of dead bodies found along the interstates….Narrowing the field to those last seen around truck stops and rest areas, the bureau counted over five hundred bodies, almost all women. Of the two hundred people on a suspect list, almost all of them were long-haul truckers." Vaselka details her effort to see if her most chilling hitch was with incarcerated serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades. The answer, though not definitive, is probably "yes."
"The Exhibit Will Be So Marked" -- Ander Monson, The Normal School
This wonderful example of an essay with associative structure begins with a mix-CD project Monson launched for his 33rd birthday. One of the offerings he receives is a micro-cassette without a case from an anonymous source and the essay follows his attempt to fix the cassette and listen to it, as well as to figure out who sent it. In doing so, it ranges across Nebraska City, Nebraska, the differences between desert and semiarid environments, fruit tree grafting, the Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, a Belle & Sebastian cover of "Sweet Home Alabama" at an Atlanta concert, and more. He does hear what's on the tape and figures out who sent it, by the way.
"Some Notes on Attunement" -- Zadie Smith, The New Yorker
Smith contrasts her openness to the new and to change in fiction with her resistance to the same in music, taking as a case in point her "not getting" Joni Mitchell until, suddenly, she did, at Tintern Abbey, of all places. She analyzes this epiphany and in so doing calls on Wordsworth, Seneca, what it means to be a connoisseur, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and Mitchell's wariness of being pigeonholed by the expectations of her audience.
"Free Rent At the Totalitarian Hotel" -- Poe Ballantine, The Sun
Documents Ballantine's time in Eureka, California during the late 1980s, right when the stock market crashed in 1987. Sharply observed details of life among his artists friends, all of them poor, contrasting the panicked speculations among pundits about what the crash might mean with how little the vanishing of so much phantom money meant to people who had almost no actual money.
"Epilogue: Deadkidistan" -- Michelle Mirsky, McSweeney's
Mirsky, who works for a children's hospital advising its administration and doctors on what it's like being the parent of a patient, describes the year her own young son, Lev, was a patient there, his death, and the two years following. She does an excellent job; the experience is exactly as awful as you imagine it must be.
"The Book of Knowledge" -- Steven Harvey, River Teeth
His parents' purchase in 1952 of the ten-volume Book of Knowledge, and specifically his mother's use of it to fill in perceived gaps in her education after the family moved from Kansas to a suburb of New York City, is the springboard for Harvey's essay. He uses this set of encyclopedias as well as a cache of family photographs--photographs he didn't look at for 50 years--and letters his mother wrote to her own mother, to understand his mother's suicide when he was twelve.
"Keeper of the Flame" -- Matthew Vollmer, New England Review
Describes a recent outing with his father, a dentist, to visit a patient on a social call in the man's Blue Ridge Mountain castle. The man, whom Vollmer's father refers to as "the Nazi"--though the man might or might not actually sympathize with the National Socialist agenda of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s--has built an actual castle in southwestern North Carolina and gathered a unique collection of World War II German Army artifacts. The visit is eerie; Vollmer can't bring himself to ask any of the questions that might discover whether the man is simply an odd collector or is an actual Nazi sympathizer, and the man is coolly noncommittal during the entire visit. Vollmer then gets a surprise when the man opens a ledger with the names of hundreds of SS officers and places his finger on one name: Vollmer.
"He didn't say, 'See, you do have Nazis in your family.' He just tapped the name with his finger. It was as if he wanted this--the fact that people with the same surname as ours had served under Hitler--to sink in on its own."
soupwitch86's review
4.0
This was a great collection of personal / narrative essays. There were quite a few that I dog-eared to re-read at a later date: Highway of Lost Girls, My Father's Women, Pigeons and His Last Game.
Cheryl Strayed starts the introduction by saying that when reading a personal essay, "the reader should feel the ground shift, if even only for a bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay." That is how I felt with the essays above. They were raw, honest and left me thinking about them long after I finished reading them. There were many others that I dog-eared certain quotes, and a few essays I could have done without, but all in all, it was a terrific collection.
Cheryl Strayed starts the introduction by saying that when reading a personal essay, "the reader should feel the ground shift, if even only for a bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay." That is how I felt with the essays above. They were raw, honest and left me thinking about them long after I finished reading them. There were many others that I dog-eared certain quotes, and a few essays I could have done without, but all in all, it was a terrific collection.
dcmr's review
4.0
"Best" is arbitrary, but I like the way theses collections introduce me to new voices and styles. Some really great writers in this one (and Cheryl Strayed is editor).
rhaines46's review
4.5
Hm I remember kind of loving reading this but not so much why. There was a good essay about a guy's dying brother. I liked Zadie Smith's one about Joni Mitchell. What else what else???