Like a really lively magazine in book form, and a bargain considering the rich diversity of its contents.
Though not required for the classroom, this annual anthology offers a selection that is usually engaging and provocative, even essential.
The first section of this collection edited by Eggers and benefiting the youth literary program of his 826 National emphasizes the playful pleasures of the written word, through quick-hit categories including “Best American Sentences on Page 50 of Books Published in 2009” (“While he slimmed down, I porked up, pregnant with our first child,” Sarah Palin), “Best American Farm Names” (“Merry Dairy,” “Thyme for Goat”) and “Best American Academic Journal Article Titles” (“Humans: The Party Animal,” “Accidental Incest”). Then the anthology proceeds to the comparatively serious business of part two, with its selection (by a committee including high-school members of 826 National) of journalism, fiction, poetry, graphic narrative and contents that challenge category. Among the highlights: David Rohde’s “Seven Months, Ten Days in Captivity” chronicles the journalist’s capture by and escape from the Taliban. Téa Obrecht’s “The Tiger’s Wife” previews what looks to be an astonishing novel. The Whitmanesque exuberance of Andrew Sean Greer’s “Gentlemen, Start Your Engines” details a gay couple’s experience at a Michigan NASCAR event, which he attended with his car-nut husband. Evan Ratliff’s “Vanished” shows his attempt to disappear in cyberspace as part of a magazine assignment that invited readers to discover his whereabouts. George Saunders’ “Tent City, U.S.A.” presents a portrait of homelessness in Fresno, and the experiences of a journalist in its midst, in the form of an anthropological study. Amy Waldman’s “Freedom” offers a parable about prisoners confined for terrorism but then released into an uncomfortable accommodation with freedom. Different readers will find different delights and different discoveries.
Like a really lively magazine in book form, and a bargain considering the rich diversity of its contents.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-24613-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
For The New Yorker, Hofstadter has taken over the role Calvin Tomkins used to fill—as art chronicler: half critic/half profile- maker. And at this he is very, very good. In the five long pieces collected here—about Jean Helion, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Avigdor Arikha, David Bomberg and the subsequent generation of London painters (Kossof, Kitaj, etc.), and Richard Diebenkorn—he almost negligently scatters brilliant associational perceptions (why, for example, Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist was hardly different from C-B the surrealist: the same ``cretinous voyaging'') while being cannier than most art writers about the varieties and dilemmas—glorious both—of representational painting. He also writes (occasionally he posturingly overwrites) with a genuinely beautiful style. But what is a little disconcerting is the form of the articles: Hofstadter seems to appear in the company of the artists he writes about here not exactly as a journalist but as an instant intimate or friend; there is an air of relaxed offhandedness (``I got to know Richard Diebenkorn in 1986, a few years before he and his wife, Phyllis, moved from Santa Monica to Healdsburg, in northern California. Dick was already sixty-five then but a lot of his strict, formal, well-to-do Protestant background still showed''). This self-conscious relaxation of role carries over as well into what he has to say about the painters: He has scorn finally for the Londoners (``dungeon masters'') on account of their all-or-nothing aesthetic neuroticism and battles with life, while reserving his highest admiration for the artist who, like Diebenkorn, is serious without solemnity. Deflation of high artistic pretension and behavior in favor of pragmatic dilution always has been, editorially, a New Yorker stock-in-trade—and Hofstadter is particularly good at it. But the attractiveness of the interesting men (and most often quite interesting artists too) that he writes about seems finally more about personal style than art.
Pub Date: April 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-58111-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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