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A review by bookish_sue
The Best American Essays 2017 by Leslie Jamison, Robert Atwan
5.0
My favorites:
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah -- The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin
Eliese Collette Goldbach -- White Horse
Alan Lightman - What Came Before the Big Bang?
Catherine Venable Moore -- The Book of the Dead
Meghan O'Gieblyn -- Dispatch from Flyover Country
I respond to the essays that connect the personal and specific to a larger American story. That said, this is the one passage I highlighted during my reading. From What Came Before the Big Bang?:
Does space go on forever, to infinity? Or is it finite but without boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere? Either answer is disturbing, and unfathomable. Where did we come from? We can follow the lives of our parents and grandparents and their parents backward in time, back and back through he generations, until we come to some ancestor ten thousand years in the past whose DNA remains in our body. We can follow the chain of being even further back in time to the first humans, and the first primates, and the one-celled amoebas swimming about in the primordial seas, and the formation of the atmosphere, and the slow condensation of gases to create Earth. It all happened, whether we think about it or not. We quickly realize how limited we are in our experience of the world. What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and galaxies, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah -- The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin
Eliese Collette Goldbach -- White Horse
Alan Lightman - What Came Before the Big Bang?
Catherine Venable Moore -- The Book of the Dead
Meghan O'Gieblyn -- Dispatch from Flyover Country
I respond to the essays that connect the personal and specific to a larger American story. That said, this is the one passage I highlighted during my reading. From What Came Before the Big Bang?:
Does space go on forever, to infinity? Or is it finite but without boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere? Either answer is disturbing, and unfathomable. Where did we come from? We can follow the lives of our parents and grandparents and their parents backward in time, back and back through he generations, until we come to some ancestor ten thousand years in the past whose DNA remains in our body. We can follow the chain of being even further back in time to the first humans, and the first primates, and the one-celled amoebas swimming about in the primordial seas, and the formation of the atmosphere, and the slow condensation of gases to create Earth. It all happened, whether we think about it or not. We quickly realize how limited we are in our experience of the world. What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and galaxies, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.