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The
Best American Essays 2006
(Paperback
- 2006)
"The essays
in this volume are powerful, plainspoken meditations
on birthing, dying, and all the business in between,"
writes Lauren Slater in her introduction to the 2006
edition. "They reflect the best of what we, as
a singular species, have to offer, which is reflection
in a context of kindness. The essays tell hard-won
tales wrestled sometimes from great pain."
The twenty powerful
essays in this volume are culled from periodicals
ranging from The Sun to The New Yorker, from Crab
Orchard Review to Vanity Fair.
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In "Missing Bellow,"
Scott Turow reflects on the death of an author he never
met, but one who "overpowered me in a way no other
writer had." Adam Gopnik confronts a different kind
of death, that of his five-year-old daughter's pet fish
-- a demise that churns up nothing less than "the problem
of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchock's Vertigo."
A pet is center stage
as well in Susan Orlean's witty and compassionate saga of
a successful hunt for a stolen border collie. Poe Ballantine
chronicles a raw-nerved pilgrimage in search of salvation,
solace, and a pretty brunette, and Laurie Abraham, in "Kinsey
and Me," journeys after the man who dared to plumb
the mysteries of human desire. Marjorie Williams gives a
harrowing yet luminous account of her life with cancer,
and Michele Morano muses on the grammar of the subjunctive
mood while proving that "in language, as in life, moods
are complicated, but at least in language there are only
two."
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Lauren Slater Books
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