The Norton book of personal essays

Review by Booklist Review

Essay anthologies have become increasingly popular, as evident by the success, for instance, of the annual Best American Essay series, and now Epstein adds to the shelf a felicitous collection of works by more than 50 outstanding twentieth-century American and British writers. A fine essayist in his own right and author of several collections, including With My Trousers Rolled (1995), Epstein ponders the status of the essay in his introduction, surmising that it is the ideal form for "ages of transition and uncertain values," clearly an apt description for the present. Epstein also opines that a number of writers revered for their novels are actually better essayists, such as George Orwell, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion. Without a doubt, the essay is the ideal vehicle for all the writers represented here, including the aforementioned as well as M. F. K. Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Tuchman, Truman Capote, Lewis Thomas, and Cynthia Ozick. --Donna Seaman

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In his introduction, Epstein contends that "whatever the ostensible subject of a personal essay, at bottom the true subject is the author of the essay." Maybe so, but the degree to which this is true varies greatly in this 53-piece collection. Mark Twain's confessions of faking his way through Italian, Truman Capote's rhapsodic recollections about Tangier ("hemmed with hills, confronted by the sea, and looking like a white cape draped on the shores of Africa") and Annie Dillard's account of an encounter with a weasel show the writers to be, respectively, amusing, passionate and thought-provoking. But personally speaking, those essays aren't on the same level as Eudora Welty's memories of childhood excursions to the neighborhood store, Rebecca West's engrossing tracing of her desire to "contemplate character" to an adolescent visit with her boorish godmother and John Gregory Dunne's touching piece about his daughter. Anyone expecting an anthology devoted to personal confessions and intimate glimpses into lives of their authors is bound to be disappointed by Epstein's occasionally off- track selection. He certainly knows what makes a good essay, being himself a fine essayist (With My Trousers Rolled, etc.), but he is also editor of the American Scholar and drew a disproportionate number of the more expository entries (five) from that publication. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The appeal of personal essays stems in part from their directness, their "shameless subjectivity." As the editor of the American Scholar and the author of five collections of essays, Epstein is eminently qualified to select and introduce 53 personal essays written in English by well-known authors during the past century. They were chosen because he "found them interesting, touching, pleasing, amusing, delightful‘above all, entertaining." The result is a potpourri of selections that vary widely in subject and style. Topics range from music, racism, and traveling to fathers, children, and childhood. Among the selections are Dorothy Parker's witty diatribe on reaching middle age and historian Barbara Tuchman's reflections about the curious letters she receives from her readers. While not all essays in this anthology will appeal to everyone, readers have a nice variety to choose from. Recommended for general literature collections.‘Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, Tex. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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