The Best American Essays 2007 Book

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.