Reviews for The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The average rating for The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-03-15 00:00:00 Jack Vaughan This is cobbled together creation, rather a literary Frankenstein's monster, a pastiche of various essays with some fiction thrown in, but it's actually a very rewarding read. You don't have to like the man or share his values to appreciate his ability to understand history's machinations, to trace trends and cultural tendencies with a rarely rivaled acumen. I don't share many of his values, and do find him to be an unremittent elitist (which is always an embarrassment for readers) but I still found this book very interesting for the way it traced the genesis of the internet and subsquent shifts globally in mores and values. He's been such a diligent reader in so many disciplines that he has much really worthwhile information to share. Yes, much of this is delivered in his trademark smarmy tone, and in a self-congratulatory gesture he includes some early essays that earned him notoriety in the literary world ("Tiny Mummies" is one of these) which really don't fit the tenor of the book at all. You might be surprised how dated and irrelevant these essays are now, and Wolfe admits as much even as he can't help including them. The man probably realizes the Elysian fields where literary snobs presumably graze on leatherbound D.W.E.M. lit for eternity cannot be that far off, and this sense of mortality has sharpened his vision somewhat. He sneers overmuch (and feel free to sneer back) but I guarantee you will come away with some very interesting backstory on our little god, the internet, and proabably a few other tangential subjects to boot. I know I did, and am grateful for having endured his pallid, often bloodless sense of life.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-06 00:00:00 Charles Dorsey This book is an anthology of long and longer articles (including one novella) by Tom Wolfe. Despite the title, Hooking Up covers a range of subjects from the at-the-time blasphemous "Tiny Mummies," about the New Yorker (no harm-note the New Yorker is still going strong/stronger 50 years later) to the sheer joy Wolfe found in various American cultures that he so optimistically portrayed. Among his books, this exuberance is seen best in The Right Stuff. Of the pieces in this anthology, my favorite by far is Wolfe's description of the joyful upending of business and technology Bob Noyce and others accomplished when they started the initial Silicon Valley companies, like Intel, in "Two Young Men Went West." Not to be missed is the riff on West Coast company workers staring at a driver for a Back East exec. For readers who like Wolfe's novels or his insightful reporting and take on non-fiction subjects, the Silicon Valley article alone is worth the price of the book. Highly recommended.