Tag Archives: The Best American Essays 2010

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The Best American Essays 2011 

Edwidge Danticat, Ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co

The Best American Essay Series this year takes the reader beneath the skin of personal experience. Its the 26th series of long form journalism pieces sourced from among America’s most insightful journalists, thinkers and authors.

Annually, a prominent writer is awarded the task of selecting the years’ shortlisted essays. This format, according to the values and premises of each editor, demonstrates the versatile form of the essay and its subjects, distilling complex ideas from diverse fields to a wider audience.

Edwidge Danticat is editor of The Best American Essays 2011.

 

Haitian born author Edwidge Danticat follows from last year’s editor, late journalist and author Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens championed essays by scientists and other specialist writers, focussing his selection on the importance of communicating the breakthrough benefits of Science, and  arespect for the scientific process in general, to a wider audience.

Danticat is author of Create Dangerously and the National Book Critics Circle award-winner for her autobiography, Brother, I am Dying. Sensitive to the challenges of writing from the self, Danticat’s selection is poignant, written almost entirely from journalists’ and authors’ first-hand observations. They include eyewitness accounts of self experience that meet the challenge of illustrating a wider issue. Danticat writes,

Such is the power of the stories we dare tell others about ourselves. They do inform, instruct and inspire. They might even entertain, but they can also strip us totally bare, reducing (or expanding) the essence of everything we are into words.

The 2011 essay selection speaks of the potential personal stories, as good stories do, to bring readers to greater understanding and empathy. The strengths of the technique lie in giving readers direct experience of rare, unusual or painful events. For many, these events would otherwise remain distant and remote. Mischa Berlinski‘s essay brings us right into Haiti’s harrowing earthquake;

The horizon swayed at an angle…the visual effect was precisely that of the grainy videos that would be shown later on television, as of somebody shaking a camera sharply. It was tremendously loud- like huge stones grinding…

Scene from Port Au Prince after the 2011 Earthquake, Haiti

Hitchens is also a contributor to this year’s edition. His ‘Topic of Cancer’ is deservedly acclaimed here for fearless self reporting during an author’s own cancer-ridden decline. First written for Vanity Fair, ‘Topic of Cancer’ began a series of articles by Hitchens. With his body rapidly approaching its Mortality, his writing reaches further toward immortality.

‘Lucky Girl’ from Bridget Potter takes readers to Brooklyn, 1962; to friends to beg for illegally bought contraception; to finding oneself unmarried and pregnant; to begging doctors to be pronounced ‘neurotic’ and so be allowed an abortion; to compulsory expulsion from school; to sharing the decision of 80% of single pregnant women who opted for illegal abortions that year over adoption; to trying to find a back-alley doctor within the remaining few ‘safe’ weeks for operation;  to trying to find money and fleeing to Puerto Rico and risking ones’ own life.

Sneaking into an empty office at work and locking the door, I picked up the phone. The overseas operator found the number and placed the call. The connection was crackly, and the man who answered neither confirmed nor denied that they would help.

The wider statistics of Potter’s experience are shared here, but the writing is acute enough that today’s political implications are powerfully, if indirectly addressed. Through the eyes of ‘Lucky Girl’ readers can imagine from a personal perspective what a nightmare scenario it recollects. Its power to astonish is that such a status can be still blithely contemplated in today’s political discourse, devoid of the kind of empathy Potter’s ‘Lucky Girl’ demands of its readers.

Personal experiences, masterfully told as here, help populate and pierce the screen of observation, bringing us into the sharply defined pixels of a larger narrative. Danticat’s selection of story essays demonstrate that senses really can be common, as can our humanity ♦

imodernreview critiques The Best American Essays 2010 in this previous article. 

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The Best American Essays 2010 Christopher Hitchens, Ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co

The Best American Essay series has released its 25th edition, a collection of long form journalism pieces sourced from amongst American journalists, thinkers and scientists.

Each year, a prominent writer in their field is awarded the task of winnowing, as the title suggests, the most exemplary shortlisted pieces into the annual collection’s book form. This year- a troubling one for him in terms of his health- the task fell to iconoclast Christopher Hitchens, arguably one of the most provocative thinkers this decade.  In a period when series editor Robert Atwan ponders in the Foreword whether essay form is in a kind of inexorable decline itself, it’s heartening that Hitchens’ introduction brandishes from the barricades, the case in this 2010 edition for the vital work that essays accomplish.

 As Hitchens notes in the introduction,

An essay is really a try, an attempt, even an adventure.

America is for him, a uniquely suitable source,

Somewhat like the word ‘intellectual’, the word ‘essayist’, and its cousin ‘pamphleteer,’ has a natural kinship with the idea of dissent… may this kinship flourish and bring forth numerous and vigorous descendants.

Of unexpected pleasure among the 21 essays collected are those that deal with specialist and scientific subjects. Specialist John Gamel’s ‘The Elegant Eyeball’, an article first published in The Alaska Quarterly Review is especially engaging. Gamel treats his subject with passion and precision, using a mix of specialist terms explained in clear layman’s language. In doing so, Gamel not only educates with great respect to reader intelligence, but beckons, like an intrepid explorer inside an ocular adventure of mountains, ravines and channels; an inner world that from this miniscule vantage looms impressively.

There before me lay a stunning image- a lacework of arteries and veins delicate as a spider’s web, spread on a burnt umber palate swirled and streaked with shades of ochre. Most spectacular of all was the retina, a transparent wafer that gleamed…in the center the optic nerve shone like a risen sun. I was in love.

Only writing of this kind can serve more entertainingly and practically than any news piece to demonstrate the importance of scientific research, an attempt this essay fully accomplishes.

The adventure of this and Steven Pinker’s ‘My Genome, My Self’ go some way to answer Hitchens’ plea, made himself in writing over a decade ago, that more be written to bring scientific advances, in areas such as bacteria research and DNA to the wider awareness of a reading public. At no time in history has the physical sciences surged so far ahead and is yet more needing of general understanding, and its corollary respect, in the wider culture.

As might be more expected, but with no decrease in pleasure, Hitchens has also selected those writings of a more literary bent. Elif Batuman’s ‘The Murder of Leo Tolstoy’ is history written as murder mystery. Like any good novel, this ‘dead body’ is thrust to the beginning, the first piece in the collection. David Sedaris’ ‘Guy Walks Into a Bar Car’ reminds us that essays can serve a lighter purpose by highlighting the ordinary in extraordinary detail. The characters described in a train’s bar compartment are delimited so finely (and as such, so hilariously) here, you begin to appreciate all over again what John Gamel wrote about in ‘The Elegant Eyeball’. Nothing escapes David Sedaris’ merciless retina.

Zadie Smith’s ‘Speaking in Tongues’ pokes at the connections between voice and Identity. Here her pen serves just as eloquently to bridge cultural divides with empathy, knowledge and a breadth of personal experience.

Christopher Hitchen’s masterful selection has shown us the powerful need for this kind of literary form. The essay, as with the examples chosen for The Best American Essays 2010 will hopefully span the generations to come.