The Best American Essays 2007 (2024)

I suppose I shouldn't be rating this because I didn't read all the essays, but I did skim the ones I didn't read fully.

I originally checked this out of the library merely to read Jo Ann Beard's "Werner," which was great and on its own deserves 5 stars. It reads like a short story, which is probably one of the reasons I liked it so much. The style of Daniel Orozco's "Shakers" was different and interesting. I also liked Jerald Walker's "Dragon Slayers," which I'm guessing is the one that guest-editor David Foster Wallace in his introduction points out as being of 'especial value.'

I'm not much of an essay reader, especially journalistic essays (which this collection seems to have maybe too much of) but I'd enjoyed Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century so much, I decided to read on. Perhaps I was spoiled by that collection, which is probably unfair to this collection, as these are only from one year and the other was unlimited, at least by year.

Looking at the names of the 'runner-up' authors (including Sheryl St. Germain) listed in the back, I wondered about maybe some of those being more to my liking. I also can't help wondering what nontraditional essays might've been included here by the editor if he hadn't had to compromise with the series editor, as he states in the nicest possible way in the introduction, though one can read between the lines ...

Picked this up dirt cheap at Powell's back in February and finally read it. Mainly was interested in DFW's introductory essay, but I wound up very much liking some of the selections and reading the anthology cover to cover. The essay "Operation Gomorrah," which is about the Allied firebombing of Hamburg in World War II, inspired me to pick up about five extra copies of the book to share with friends.

The other balls-out stand-up essays in the book are "Shakers" by Daniel Orozco, and "In the Mosque of Imam Ali" by Phillip Robertson.

I can't recommend these essays enough. "Operation Gomorrah" changed my understanding of what literature is uniquely capable of -- a film can show a firebombing, but a story or essay can communicate how somebody actually perceives and comprehends that firebombing. It sounds elementary, but until reading this essay I never really appreciated this. Sure, a film can show how an actor reacts to a firebombing, which clues you in to how they perceive and comprehend an event. But good writing forces you to comprehend a situation using the same concepts, metaphors, and language by which you might comprehend an event if you had not only been there, but lived a life entirely different from your own right up to the point of that experience.

"Shakers" was good in so, so many ways. It's about an earthquake in California ... well, sort of. Really, it's about how lonely you can be surrounded by other people, and how meaningful or profound it is to be aware of your aloneness and mortality -- and how cusp-of-death awareness spawns an acute yearning for a connection with other people. That yearning isn't actually loneliness, but something much better: "[He will feel:] some vague and elemental conviction about wholeness or harmony or immortality ... How cool is this! he will think. Wish you were here! he will think." Also, stylistically, there is some cool stuff going on where natural phenomena are described by way of personification, which helps to convey that feeling of "alone-but-not-really-alone."

The essay "In the Mosque of Imam Ali" is some of the best reporting I've seen on the war in Iraq. It's the sort of long-form, literary stuff that explains the situation in a way that an endless parade of daily body counts never will.

Many other good essays, but that's what stands out. There wasn't anything that left me feeling totally let down. A lot of the essays are concerned with war, politics/policy, and the state of the world at large. They earn inclusion for being not "best" essays as in "best written," but rather "most important" or "most relevant." And while the subject matter is definitely important stuff, it's not exactly fun leisure reading.

Anyway, that's all I can think of right now.

I was reticent to pick up this anthology. While I generally buy whatever comes out in the The Best American Series each year, this years editor of the American Essays, David Wallace Foster, is a writer I don't particularly care for. Truthfully, I think his writing is on a different level than most. He is extremely smart, and very witty. Stylistically, he writes like the whole universe exists purely so we can read his words. And that's basically what I dislike about him. I don't really care for how his books tend to flat out say, "if you don't understand whats going on here then you're an idiot."
However, after scanning through the list of authors that were chosen, I decided to give it a chance. What I found inside pleased me to no end. While some people find essayists to be long winded and at times preachy, I find that good essayists tell a "real life" story with enough panache that the reader is left to come up with their own conclusion on how they feel about the issue.
Inside, I found a wonderful world of Dog Whisperer's, cults, a man's painful lose of his cat, the war on Iraq, and gender and race studies with Mel Gibson thrown in the mix. A nice addition to the continuation of the American essay in a country who's growing children refuse to read anymore.

I'm about halfway through David Foster Wallace's 2007 essay selections. Sometimes I feel as if I'm reading the Sunday paper--opinion pieces about torture and war, pedophilia and dog hypnosis. My mind reels and it's a slow journey. An afternoon of WWII bombings sent me on a week-long hiatus, for example. But this collection suits me, too. After reading _The Kitchen God's Wife_ and basically hating it, I've been trying to understand the nature of violence. In his intro, Wallace describes the essays in this collection as " . . . models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways--ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar." I'm all for dispatching with the noisemakers, but we'll see if I ever make it through this volume. . .

Aside from feeling a bit like I've been force-fed my vegetables, I'm grateful for David Foster Wallace's editorial choices for this collection. Elaine Scarry's "Rules of Engagement" had me rapt, as did "In the Mosque of Imam Ali" (Phillip Robertson), "What Should a Billionaire Give?" (Peter Singer), and "Dragon Slayers" (Jerald Walker).

Hit or miss, as per usual with this series:
introduction: Prior to reading this, I was a tentative David Foster Wallace fan. Now I want to smack him. This essay was like every annoying Wallace-ism condensed into one half-assed introduction. We start with the usual kind of smarmy self-deprecation, then he hits us with the quintessential Wallace non-answer. "Well, who am I to say what the best essays are?" UGH! It's just so smug and stupid. My biggest issue with him as a writer (starting with when I first read Consider the Lobster) is his tendency to address large, philosophical questions with an extensive exploration that ends with a resounding, "I dunno!" And he's right about the Total Noise of our culture, but I think the point of writing is not to throw your hands in the air and shrug because you can never really be 100% right, but to try to find some sort of meaning in nothingness. Wallace seems to have this belief that having opinions and feelings about those opinions is anti-intellectual, which is annoying for multiple reasons, but mainly because he clearly has an "agenda" himself. I would say you could construe there being an "agenda" in any one of these pieces, but the only reason they don't bother him is because he agrees, and therefore they seem logical and not anti-intellectual. Also, he, like, subtweets (metaphorically) Robert Atwan several times in this? He makes these allusions to Atwan being kind of a dictator, which I think is kind of petty and immature. Everyone on Goodreads seems to be on Wallace's side, but I'm going with Atwan here. Why are you beefing with a 90 year old? Obviously I don't know the situation, but the essay threw Atwan under the bus so that Wallace could be the countercultural hero who explains the innerworkings of the Best American Essay Series, like an undercover spy in this foreign land of wealthy intellectuals. You aren't fooling me, buddy. You went to Amherst!! I know what you are...
Some thoughts on a few essays:
Freedom to Offend: Woof... very Wallace, to say the least. This whole essay deeply, profoundly clunky. No flow, just some guy ranting. He does actually make some good points, but this was just all over the place - the Mel Gibson anecdote was fine, but felt forced. Did not like.
Fathead's Hard Times: To be so honest I read this when I was sick so was not as engaged as I could have been. Maybe I will reread this and like it more. Didn't seem to be particularly urgent, or relevant, or interesting.
An Orgy of Power: The best piece about the Iraq War in the collection.
What the Dog Saw: Of course Wallace is a Malcolm Gladwell guy...
Afternoon of the Sex Children: I think this was tentatively my favorite. I need to reread it! Had a difficult time relating to some of these because I was two when all of this happened, so don't really have any connection to them besides historical context. But this piece was so prescient, it felt like it was speaking directly to our culture now. Oh Mark Greif, save us from the anti-wrinkle straws!
Petrified: Not sure what possessed them to select this piece... it was good, but I don't quite get how it make it so far along.
A Carnivore's Credo: Didn't really agree 100%, but outdid Consider the Lobster, if that counts for anything.
Dragon Slayers: Top 3!!! So good. Simple, relevant, wonderful.

I thought the first half of the book (the 11 essays ending with Louis Menand's) was mediocre and probably worthy of 2 stars. I thought the second half of the book (the 11 essays beginning with Daniel Orozco's) was excellent and probably worthy of 4 stars. So, as a result, this book gets 3 stars from me.

Being someone who isn't afraid to quit a book after 100 pages or so, I was surprised by DFW's decision to put the best 11 essays at the end of the book and the worst 11 at the beginning. I mean, I could very easily have quit reading after Malcolm Gladwell's or Garret Keizer's essays and I never would have made it to the better essays, like Richard Rodriguez's and Elaine Scarry's. I know that DFW, in his introduction, encouraged me to skip around but I'm a linear type of guy and skipping around just isn't going to happen.

What? The essays were ordered alphabetically? Yeah, I knew that. I was just pointing out the silliness of ordering things alphabetically. Being someone whose last name begins with a W and whose grade school teachers were either unimaginative or creatures of habit (or both), I'm fed up with alphabetical discrimination. I was always last in line for recess and lunch and I always had to play on the O-Z team (which was filled with fat kids (see the next sentence, for example)) in PE class. Even worse, I was forced to sit in the back-right of the classroom behind Timmy Thomas, who had a huge head and breathed like he was snoring, while my friend Bobby Bojangles had the pleasure of staring at Adriana Anderson's amazingly large breasts (amazing because we were in grade school!) all day long.

Since DFW also had a last name starting with a W, I'm sure he never would have stooped to alphabetical discrimination. In fact, I wonder if his encouragement to skip around was his way of saying, "Those first 11 essays are crap and I would totally have ordered the essays in reverse-alphabetical order if I was allowed but I am not, probably because my last name begins with a W." So, I'm forced to conclude that this is just one of those standard rules for the Best American Essay series that no guest editor (from the O-Z group, at least) has the power to overrule. I guess I'll just have to direct my anger at the Series Editor, a fellow named Robert Atwan.

Best of the Best

David Foster Wallace's introduction is even more poignant and reflective about our culture after his passing earlier this year.

Danner's essay on the Iraq war is a complex, nuanced, insightful look at the reasons for going to war and the reasons the public was told that the US was going to war.

Keizer's essay on gun rights / violence didn't necessarily change my opinions on the issue but did help me empathize with the other side.

Lahr's essay about stagefright is anecdotally amusing

Rodriguez's essay about a sense of place / optimism in California is solid but could have broadened the scope to include America's place in the world. I read it that way anyway.

Scarry's essay about America's fall to neo-absolutism oversteps its case at times but is very good as a whole about the atrocities that are carried out in our names in the current war.

Scruton's essay about eating meat as an act of communion starts out weak but builds to a strong finish.

Singer's essay about charitable giving is awesome. I would recommend the book solely on the strength of this essay.

There are a couple of essays in the collection that were just miserable and I swore to myself that I would never read those authors' work again, but overall, there are too many excellent pieces to warrant less than a 4 star rating.

holy disappointment. i love DFW, so i picked this up. i read his introduction and 9 of the 22 "essays". his intro was vintage DFW. the best thing in the book. great. hilarious, insightful, perceptive, informative. so imagine how excited i was to read 22 essays that this master essayist said he "envied" because they did things with language that he "only wished that he could do".

of the 9 that i read, the first "essay" in the book, Werner, was by far the best. five stars. the only thing is that if that's an essay, i'm moby dick. it's basically a short story that i suppose happens to be true. zero elements of an essay. zero.

the only other essay i recommend is the one by Peter Singer on how a reasonable donation by only the richest 10% of americans could solve all the world's problems. asking for a 10% donation from the rich and a 33% donation from the ultra-super-rich, he gets a total of 800 billion dollars a year or something. enough to totally eliminate hunger, disease, poverty, etc.

the other 7 i read were so horrible i won't waste your time.

so i guess there might have been a couple winners among the 13 i didn't read, but holy shiz...

i guess it goes to show that a great writer (DFW) is not necessarily a great reader.

I wasn't that taken with DFW's intro, which, like a lot of his "Lobster" material, reminded me of earlier Wallace, pretty much the same way "Darjeeling Limited" reminds me of earlier Wes Anderson.

And although I suppose I buy his rationale for including quite so much political material--the collection does end up feeling very much "of the times"--I wish there'd been more emphasis on "Best" and ""Essays," rather than "American" and "2007" (by which we seem to mean 2006). To be fair, I'm not sure whether I'd've felt the same way if I were a regular reader of the BAE series. I've never read another book from this series--it was DFW's name on the cover that got me to pick up this one--so I was mostly interested in any selection of good, well-crafted prose, not necessarily 2007's prose.

I either buy or am given a copy of this series every year, and it never disappoints. I would've given this a 4 1/2 if I could've...can't remember which essays are best, but would say that I always am surprised and amazed by the quality of writing. And I find myself learning a lot & glad that I'm catching the essays this way, since I missed them in the New Yorker or Harper's or wherever. I am now reading the 1988 Best American Essays (the year I graduated from high school) and finding most of the essays so far very much worth my time. The essay is probably my favorite writing form.

Some very interesting essays. Very eclectic collection. I was intrigued by Wallace being the editor, not knowing very much about his writing, to read him for the first time that way. He had an interesting introduction on essays. A little intrigued, I may now seek out one of his novels to read. These collections are great and I recommend them for someone who doesn't have a great deal of time to just read something straight through. They are great for just picking up and perusing throughout the day.

I love these "Best American" collections. This one included one of the best pieces of writing I've read in some time, the essay "Shakers" by Daniel Orozco. There was unfortunately a lot of crap included, and the content leaned a little heavily toward essays about Iraq.

While the essays are exemplary, David Foster Wallace's introduction is the high point of this collection. I recommend waiting until you've read all the pieces before capping it off with Wallace's view of the essay in contemporary US society.

Dude, David Foster Wallace picking his favorite essays from 2007. Not much more needs to be said than that. Great variety of really astounding essays on a variety of topics. A few were meh but I found those to be the exceptions.

There are a few fantastic essays in this compilation, particularly from Malcolm Gladwell and Phillip Robertson. But you owe it to yourself and everything you hold precious in this world to get off your ass and go read Daniel Orozco's "Shakers", a truly sublime piece of writing.

This book is worth picking up for David Foster Wallace's introduction essay, if for no other reason.

Some essays got really political, and that was annoying, but there are some awsome essays in here. Check it out.

Here is my list of the best of the best of 2007:

"Afternoon of the Sex Children" by Mark Greif
"What should a billionaire give" by Peter Singer
"Carnivore's Credo" by Roger Scruton

Brilliant!

A solid collection of essays. Favourites include Werner, What the Dog Saw, Petrified, and Rules of Engagement.

I bought this because I'm obsessed with DFW but has read everything he's published (and more) and am obviously grasping at straws here. I think I would have enjoyed reading these more in 2007 (had I not been 9 years old then) because of their topicality to 2007 affairs (the Iraq War, for one), although those essays are still interesting, just not so pertinent to where my brain is at the moment as I'd wish.

There are some snoozers here who's raison d'etre eludes me, but the highlights are high indeed. "Shakers" in particular is a gem, containing, for one, my favourite paragraph in this collection (about a man pinned underneath a tree following an earthquake):

"And hours from now, after the sun has gone down, when he is shivering from the cold, when the cold is all he can think about, something remarkable will happen. A diamondback rattlesnake will home in his heat-trace and unwind itself from the mesh of a creosote bush and drop to the ground and seek the warmth of his body against the chill evening, slicing through the sand and sweeping imperiously between his legs and turning into itself until coiled tight against his groin and draped along his belly with the offhand imtimacy of a lover's arm. He will watch its dumpling-sized head in repose on his sternum go up and down with his breathing, its eyes open and indifferent and exquisitly wrought — tiny bronzed beads stripped black and verdigris. And his breaths will soon come slow and steady, and his despair will give way to something wholly unexpected. He is eyeball to eyeball with a rattlesnake in the powdery moonglow of Mojave desert. He can hear birds calling back and forth — birdsong! — in the middle of nowhere. He can look up at a night sky that is like gaping into a chasm boiling with stars as if the celestial spigots were open wide and jammed, and he can remember nothing of the life he's lived up to now. And he will shake, not from cold or fear or any movements of the earth, but from some vague and elemental conviction about wholeness or harmony or immortality. He will shake, resolute in a belief in the exaltation of this moment, yet careful not to disturb the lethal snake on his chest. How cool is this! he will think. Wish you were here! he will think."

7/10 – Introduction (David Foster Wallace)
7/10 – Werner (Jo Ann Beard)
6/10 – The Freed0m to Offend (Ian Buruma)
6/10 – Iraq: The War of the Imagination (Mark Danner)
3/10 – Fathead's Hard Times (W.S. Di Piero)
5/10 – An Orgy of Power (George Gessert)
6/10 – What the Dog Saw (Malcom Gladwell)
7/10 – Afternoon of the Sex Children (Mark Greif)
6/10 – Operation Gomorrah (Marione Ingram)
5/10 – Loaded (Garret Keizer)
6/10 – Petrified (John Lahr)
8/10 – Name That Tone (Louis Menand)
9/10 – Shakers (Daniel Orozco)
4/10 – Out from Xanadu (Cynthia Ozick)
4/10 – Passion Flowers in Winter (Molly Peacock)
6/10 – In the Mosque of Amam Ali (Phillip Robertson)
6/10 –Onward, Christian Liberals (Marilynne Robinson)
5/10 –Dissapointment (Richard Rodriguez)
5/10 –Rules of Engagement (Elaine Scarry)
4/10 – A Carnivore's Credo (Roger Scruton)
6/10 – What Should a Billionare Give — and What Should You Do? (Peter Singer)
6/10 – Dragon Slayers (Jerald Walker)
5/10 – Apocalypse Now (Edrawd O. Wilson)

A better than average collection of essays, with some true standouts. Interestingly, one of those standouts was the introduction from guest editor David Foster Wallace, reminding me of just how awesome he was and what we are missing now that he is gone.

Of the 4 Best American series I read, the Essays series is of course the one most rooted in place and time. So as I work my way backwards in time, the Essays have an interesting layer of review as I read from my "future" perspective on familiar events from the past that were topical at the time. This series includes essays from 2006, and so there was a preoccupation with the Iraq War and when America might get out of it already, and the relevations of Abu Ghraib and what it says about us as a country. Sadly, all of that and the accompanying concern about the Bush administration from that time have echoes in our current administration. Thank God we are not at war, as even without it, things seem worse now.

This is a collection of mostly essays, I find it necessary to state mostly essays because in my opinion the first "essay" presented resembles a short story rather than an essay. I understand from the editor's notes he is looking to push the definition of what an essay is, what is accepted as being an essay, is it possible to write an essay that reads like a short story. It doesn't work for me especially when it is demonstrated within the other essays included there are powerful stories being told in essays that fit within the traditional definition of what an essay is, specifically I'm thinking of Operation Gomorrah by Marione Ingram.

I'm giving this collection three stars mostly because I feel betrayed by the first essay, I was given a bait and switch, I was played for a fool. That feeling has lasted with me from finishing the first essay till I finished the last, none of the following essays were able to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.

The foolish political analysts of the late aughts thought they were on the cusp of a precipitous descent into hell itself. (Whereas it's exactly this moment that is the cusp. No, rather this moment. Actually it's this moment...) In fact, the political briefs on the Iraq war (there are four of them) are all quite good, if at times alarmist(: 'if Bush is enthusiastic about the use of torture, which is in violation of the Geneva conventions, then we can expect his enthusiastic use of nuclear weapons which are not in violation of these conventions...' ) The disguised fiction/prose pieces aren't terrible either, but the mediocre essays outnumber the good, and none of them produce lasting insight.

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Instead we have a collage of DFW's worst impulses, which point backward to his despair. It's one thing to 'lament the horrors of the modern age' while recognizing modern bane/boon are dialectical i.e. 'there is also good'. It's another thing to 'lament the horrors of the modern age' as an unsmiling social reactionary. DFW's perspective on our great 'social degeneration' is more or less: 'These are problems that have never existed before and are currently a major threat to the integrity of our society. We could solve all these problems if everyone listened to me.' Ahistorical at best. Which problems merit this alarm? Late 90s 'Political Correctness' scares in The Freedom to Offend, 'Sexual Degeneracy' panics in Afternoon of the Sex Children, Late 90s 'Liberal Idiocy' screeds in Loaded and Dragon Slayers, 'My-philoosphy-and-political-ideas-are-correct-and-everyone-would-agree-with-me-if-they-just-heard-my-argument' in Out From Xanadu, Apocalypse Now, and others.

A good year. Here's what I remember liking a lot: "Petrified," John Lahr's piece on the extremities of stage-fright/public speaking; "Out from Xanadu," Cynthia Ozick's recounting of her young obsession with developing a personal artist's mission statement using the Romantic poets as exemplars; "Passion Flowers in Winter," Molly Peacock on the importance of choosing role models for life and work; "Rules of Engagement," Elaine Scarry on American and international rules of war (extremely eye-opening); and "Dragon Slayers," Jared Walker on turning oppression into empowerment.

There are several pieces I've omitted, which I'm sure I loved as strongly, but regardless those are some good samples. I'd say pick this one up.

Picked this up purely to see what DFW had to say about The Essay™ and ironically ended up liking him less mostly due to his intro and partially due to his selection. Collection as a whole is overloaded in what the internet has recently dubbed "Enlightened Centrism." The stand-out essays are "Werner" by Jo Ann Beard, "Shakers" by Daniel Orozco (which I probably would not classify as an essay), and "Passion Flowers in Winter" by Molly Peacock. The three(/four) Iraq essays are interesting to revisit as a kind of sad experiment in how quickly those conversations evaporated.

Essays pertaining to current state of the world are insightful.

I just bought this for the David Foster Wallace introduction.

Some really great essays. Some are outdated but others are still relevent and raise some good points. I especially found Dragon Slayers and Afternoon of the Sex Child particularly interesting.

Shakers, Werner, Imam Ali

A disproportionate number of essays about Iraq, which I found valuable and edifying as someone who was in middle school at the time and therefore oblivious.