KEY WEST BED & BREAKFAST, Key West Lodging and Accommodation Guide: Florida Traveling Guides: The Best American Essays 2004 (The Best American Series)

Location: Home » Florida Traveling Guides » General AAS » The Best American Essays 2004 (The Best American Series)

Similar Items:

•	The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series)
•	The Best American Essays 2006 (The Best American Series (TM))
•	The Best American Essays 2003 (The Best American Series)
•	The Best American Essays 2007 (Edition 001)
•	Best American Essays 2002 (The Best American Series)

Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. Here you will find another "splendid array of unpredictable and delectable essays" (Booklist), chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Louis Menand, another collection with "delights on every page" (Dallas Morning News). The Best American Essays once again earns its place as the liveliest and leading annual of its kind.

Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Great Essays, except for one or two. June 22, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

After reading the book, the above comments are quite accurate. I would just like to point out, as it already has been, that the "my 80's" essay was included for purely personal reasons.

After reading excellent quality essays like "The last Americans" & "Passover in Baghdad" & to then get dragged through "On TV I saw Brideshead Revisited and the Patrice Chereau production of Wagner's Ring...and then "Sometime in the mid-'80s I stopped swallowing cum. I don't miss its taste".

Nothing inherently wrong with that, I guess, but I submit not one of the best American essays of 2004. Sorry, call me low brow.

"My Lost City" & "My Fathers a Book" make it worth buying.

Thank you.

2 out of 5 stars

Obscure Chetkovich October 21, 2005
Thank goodness this text was edited(?) by someone who has reflected on the Bible. Everyone in this book writes like a Steinbeck want-to-be. Catching my eye most drastically was the search result blurb from Google: "In this autobiographical essay, Chetkovich, an obscure short story writer, ..." I hope that is the correct spelling of the word "obscure." Does the use of the term "obscure short story writer" not actually mean "this writer is so bad arse, she MUST be read. Immediately! She MUST have as much of your money as possible, she MUST occupy as much of your household thought as possible." Hmmm...sounds like a writer I want to read. Where'd she get the name "Kathryn"? Isn't that a name for someone who requires a lot of your attention? I used to respect the name Chetkovich. I know better now.

2 out of 5 stars

Good quality, poor customer service September 26, 2005
0 out of 22 found this review helpful

The book is in excellent condition. It is of no use to me however. I did not recieve the book until almost a month after I ordered it. I had to use it for one of my classes,and I could not wait any longer for it to arrive, so had to go to the school bookstore and buy another copy of the book. When the copy i bought from the Amazon merchant arrived, I tried to return it, but I could not find a return address anywhere. I sent the merchant an e'mail asking for a return address four days ago, but I have still not recieved an address. I am very disappointed by this lack of customer service, and because I will probably not be able to get a refund now, since it has been more than thirty days since I ordered the book.

5 out of 5 stars

22 tasty, nourishing servings of brain food January 1, 2005
12 out of 15 found this review helpful

"The Best American Short Stories" may be more popular, but "The Best American Essays" anthology is an even better choice for readers seeking the utmost in nourishment for the brain. The twenty-two selections chosen by Louis Menand, which cover a wide variety of topics, are all exceedingly well written, mind expanding, and, to a high degree, personal, in that they reveal something about the author as well as the subject matter. In spite of the two minor flaws of Menand's selections (discussed below), this collection will definitely reward the reader seeking substantive reading material.

The two most powerful essays in the book are two of the most personal. Kathryn Chetkovich's "Envy" pulls no punches in her analysis of how she reacted to the success experienced by her boyfriend and fellow writer, Jonathan Franzen, who rocketed to literary stardom in 2001 with "The Corrections". Interestingly, Chetkovich doesn't name Franzen, but Menand chose also to include an essay by him ("Caught"), which, although interesting, doesn't have the same emotional depth or power as Chetkovich's essay. The other extraordinary essay in the collection is Laura Hillenbrand's "A Sudden Illness", which describes her incredible struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Her personal story is every bit as poignant as the story of the racehorse Seabiscuit, which she chronicled in her best-selling book.

Other essays of note, I feel, include Luc Sante's "My Lost City", which actually celebrates the crime-ridden, graffiti-covered, anarchic, decaying, pre-Rudy Giuliani New York of the 1980s, and Oliver Sacks' "The Mind's Eye", which describes differences in the extent to which several blind people use visualization techniques, thereby illustrating the power of (and structural differences among) human brains.

As for the minor complaints: Menand openly admits, "I like to read stories about my own times." This bias shows up most obviously in the inclusion of an essay by a CUNY colleague of Menand's: Wayne Koestenbaum's "My `80s" will likely not at all resemble your `80s unless you are a NYC opera buff who kept up with the cutting edge of male homosexual intelligentsia literature. The other complaint is that a small number of essays exhibit the stereotypical upper West side salon superior-than-though attitude which sneers at red state values and culture (e.g. Fox News). Of course, if you are of a similar opinion, this won't bother you a bit. However, one essay takes this attitude to completely illogical extremes: Jared Diamond's "The Last Americans", which somehow claims a linkage between Enron's financial shenanigans and global warming (hey, it's all George Bush's fault, right?). Diamond's essay will leave some readers fuming and others shaking their heads, while still others applaud, but it will cause all readers to think, as do all the essays in this collection. Thus, Menand has created a collection well worth spending the time to read and ponder.

4 out of 5 stars

Writing That Makes You Think December 28, 2004
9 out of 12 found this review helpful

As a longtime fan of the Best American Series, I have a few suggestions for the editors: 1) Change "American" to "English Language" so that you can include the outstanding essays that appear in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and beyond; and 2) Don't forget to consider the great essays that appear in online publications such as Slate.com and Salon.com.

In spite of these omissions, the 2004 issue of Best American Essays is excellent. The range is broad - these essays are all over the place, from Susan Orleans's amusing visit to a taxidermy convention to Kathryn Chetkovich's confession of jealousy of her boyfriend's (the never-named Jonathan Franzen) success as a writer.

Two of the essays were written decades ago, one by Tennessee Williams and one by James Agee, but newly rediscovered in 2004. Jared Diamond and Oliver Sacks are informative yet readable as usual and well worth your time. One of my favorites was an off-the-wall essay about knitting from the Harvard Review by Kyoko Mori. I have never knitted and would not have thought that an essay about yarn could be so entertaining.