Reliable and yet still surprising—the best of the best.
The 2007 edition of the now-venerable series.
With characteristic humor and self-abasement, guest editor Wallace is an excellent guide to this year’s goodie bag of magazine-length nonfiction, noting up front that most series readers jump around in a nonlinear fashion. Although he promises a sharper political edge to this year’s selections—and no celebrity profiles—only a few fall into that category. Phillip Robertson’s “In the Mosque of the Imam Ali,” a breathless account of the author’s attempt to survive in an Iraq hurtling into Year Zero ultra-violence, ranks with Michael Herr’s exemplary Vietnam War reportage. Mark Danner’s “Iraq: The War of the Imagination” is an excellent summation of the stunning mix of incompetence and hubris that led to the current war. There is also “An Orgy of Power,” George Gessert’s passionate screed against the brutalization of the American mindset in the post-9/11 era, and Garret Keizer’s controversial “Loaded,” in which he breaks the domestic liberal code of silence on guns and political action: “Give me some people who are not so evolved that they have forgotten what it is to stand firm under fire…Give me an accountant who can still throw a rock.” Even among the lighter pieces, there’s a darkness scurrying around the edges, like in Richard Rodriguez’s “Disappointment,” an illuminating essay on the state’s illusory dreamlands, or Malcolm Gladwell’s sublime New Yorker piece on Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Millan, in which tales of simple obedience training carry a cutting psychoanalytic edge. Remarkably, this year’s collection contains no outright duds, though a few pieces maunder a bit (e.g., Mark Greif’s foggy dissertation on the commercialized eroticization of youth, “Afternoon of the Sex Children”). Among all these impressive essays, though, the best is Daniel Orozco’s extraordinary “Shakers,” which merges an earthquake’s progress with a series of snapshot takes on American travelers and loneliness (“The middle of nowhere is always somewhere for somebody”).
Reliable and yet still surprising—the best of the best.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-70926-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.
A mammoth edition, including the novel, illustrations, maps, a chronology, and bibliography, but mostly thousands of annotations that run the gamut from revealing to ridiculous.
New editions of revered works usually exist either to dumb down or to illuminate the original. Since its appearance in 1813, Austen's most famous work has spawned numerous illustrated and abridged versions geared toward younger readers, as well as critical editions for the scholarly crowd. One would think that this three-pounder would fall squarely in the latter camp based on heft alone. But for various other reasons, Shapard's edition is not so easily boxed. Where Austen's work aimed at a wide spectrum of the 19th-century reading audience, Shapard's seems geared solely toward young lit students. No doubt conceived with the notion of highlighting Austen's brilliance, the 2,000-odd annotations–printed throughout on pages facing the novel's text–often end up dwarfing it. This sort of arrangement, which would work extremely well as hypertext, is disconcerting on the printed page. The notes range from helpful glosses of obscure terms to sprawling expositions on the perils awaiting the character at hand. At times, his comments are so frequent and encyclopedic that one might be tempted to dispense with Austen altogether; in fact, the author's prefatory note under "plot disclosures" kindly suggests that first-time readers might "prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction." Those with a term paper due in the morning might skip ahead to the eight-page chronology–not of Austen's life, but of the novel's plot–at the back. In the end, Shapard's herculean labor of love comes off as more scholastic than scholarly.
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745053-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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