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| The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series) | 
 enlarge | Creators: Susan Orlean, Robert Atwan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $13.99 (100%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 307848
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0618357130
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.008
EAN: 9780618357130
ASIN: 0618357130
Publication Date: October 5, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Some wear on book from reading, spine creases, wear on binding and pages, we guarantee all purchases and ship all items via USPS mail.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-7 of 7 | | « PREV | | |
 Considering Lobsters, Robots, Time Machines, and French Cooking January 9, 2006
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
It's true that six of the twenty-five essays here were previously published in The New Yorker and that guest editor Susan Orlean is a staff writer for The New Yorker. But you don't have to work for The New Yorker to think that it, along with Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, contain the best essay writing in America today.
I think it would hard for any guest editor to go too far wrong, given that the assignment is to pick twenty-five essays from one hundred that have been selected by the Series Editor and his staff from the hundreds of essays submitted. Presumably, any twenty-five would be pretty good.
The subject matter in Best American Essays 2005 is all over the place. There are essays about hummingbirds, diagramming sentences, forgetfulness, and robots. I start all the essays and end up skipping or skimming about half. But the half that I do read are what essays ought to be, thoughtful pieces of writing that make you think, and maybe even change the way you think.
Some of the grabbers in this volume are Oliver Sacks' mind-bending Speed, about how we perceive time; Cathleen Schine's Dog Trouble, a remarkable narration about how she dealt with her psychotic dog; Jonathan Franzen's The Comfort Zone, about his childhood fascination with Charles Schulz and Peanuts; and David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, examining lobsters from more angles than you thought possible, all of them riveting.
One of the things I enjoy most about anthologies like this is that I can re-read old favorites like David Sedaris and Oliver Sacks, as well as find writers whose work is new to me. I'm delighted to find, just as I've finished reading Consider the Lobster, that David Foster Wallace has a new collection of his essays out that is going right on my to-read list.
a relatively diverse grouping for the Best American Series December 10, 2005
5 out of 13 found this review helpful
I thought Orlean did a pretty good job of including a lot of work that wasn't in the major magazines. Compared to some of the other editions of this series, she actually seemed to have read a range of material.
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