The Best American Essays 2007 (Edition 001)

The Best American Essays is an annual christmas gift to my husband. This year, I decided to read a few essays to see why he likes them. This really is a "best" selection of essays on various subjects edited by a different guest writer every year. The essays are always compelling reads and are ideal when you know there will be a wait, i.e. Dr's office, etc.

I picked up this volume with some trepidation, only because I had walked around the whole bookstore and nothing had yet quite caught my eye. How could someone choose "the best essays" out of the abundance of magazines and wouldn't the winners have to be low-to-middle-brow to sell copy? Well, I was happily mistaken. The volume is terrific.

I haven't read every essay in the book, but I have read more then half and no one picks up these books to read them cover-to-cover. Only a couple have disappointed. Most others were real page-turners. A few essays in particular caught my attention:

"A Carnivore's Credo" - Roger Scruton explains why vegetarians are right in being appalled by the modern food system, but wrong in their solution of skipping meat. Almost got me to start eating meat again.

"The Freedom to Offend" - Ian Buruma offers a short polemic on why we give up our free speech for sensitivity only with peril.

"Afternoon of the Sex Children" - Mark Greif leads us through a tour of today's seriously messed up relationship with sexual youth. On one hand, pedophilia is more stigmatized (rightly) than ever before, but on the other hand our celebrity culture, our literature, our advertising and our pornography celebrate sex with young people. What happened?

Sereval Iraq-related essays - If you've been paying attention, the specifics aren't news, but several essays do a great service of compiling and presenting coherently the chaos that has been the American intervention in Iraq.

Sophiscated, funny, insightful. Reading this book isn't that different than reading the New York Times Magazine, VQR, Atlantic Monthly, or many other magazines that are well-written and don't condescend. Except that this book is, after all, a selection of the "best," without the inevitable filler (and ads!) of a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly rag.

The diverse collection of 22 essays address some of the most urgent issues we're facing today. Here are some highlights:

"A Carnivore's Credo" by Roger Scruton: He writes a unique defense of meat-eating and rebukes vegetarianism.

"What Should a Billionaire Give--and What Should You?" by Peter Singer. He presents what many will find to be an extreme view of charity.

"Dragon Slayers"by Jarald Walker. The author, an African American, refutes a definition of embattled victimization as too limiting to African Americans.

"Apocalypse Now" by Edward O. Wilson. Wilson's attempt to bridge the gulf between science and religion in a "letter" to Baptists challenges the practices of both the scientific and religious community.

"An Orgy of Power" by George Gessert. The author shows the disturbing use of torture in US policy as being out of bounds historically.

"Loaded" by Garret Keizer. A "progressive" defense of gun ownership rooted in a Hobbesian worldview lays out the gun debate in a way I've never seen.

"What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell. The author profiles "dog whisperer"and shows that many American dog owners unwittingly harm their dogs when they treat their pets like humans.

"Petrified" by John Lahr. He shows the curse of stage-fright and self-consciousness and why there is a moral imperative to overcome these afflictions.

"Onward, Christian Liberals" by Marilynne Robinson. The author rebukes "fundamentalism" by arguing that it is a betrayal of real Christianity.

After reading Best American Non-Required Reading 2007 and being disappointed, I was reluctant to buy Best American Essays 2007. I am happy to report that I wasn't disappointed with this book. What a difference great editing makes!

The essays in this book are daring. "Afternoon of the Sex Children" reprinted from N+1 was very good. I am suprised that anyone has the courage to put sex and children in the same sentence much less explore Nabakov's themes in the age of Britney Spears grinding in pigtails and "no sex education in schools". It's been refreshing to read essays that don't go over the same tired themes that magazines repeatedly explore. When this book did reprint essays that explored some unoriginal people or themes, they were the best essays on those subjects I'd read. For example, I didn't think I would want to read another essay on Cesar The Dog Whisperer because I 've read something about this guy everywhere and I was disappointed to see this book include another story about him. But "What The Dog Saw" was so well written I begged my husband to read it so that we could discuss it.

This is a good collection of essays. I took off one star because I felt there were too many short stories in a collection that should have been devoted to essays. Not that the short stories weren't good. The collection opens with a short "Malcolm" which was one of my favourite pieces in the book. A good argument is made by David Foster Wallace that these are narratives and therefore eligible for inclusion. But these contributions read and felt like short stories to me and I really wanted essays as there is another book in this series devoted to short stories.