Best American Essays 2002

by Gould, Stephen Jay; Atwan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780618049325
• ISBN10: 0618049320
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Mariner Books

Summary

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads hundreds of pieces from dozens of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.From The New Yorker to the Missouri Review, from Esquire to the American Scholar, the editors of The Best American Essays have scoured hundreds of the country's best periodicals in search of the most artful and powerful writing around. This thoughtful, provocative collection is the result of their search.

Author Biography

Stephen Jay Gould was the author of classic works on evolution and other scientific topics, among them The Mismeasure of Man, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, The Panda's Thumb, and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. He died in May 2002

Table of Contents

Foreword	viii
Robert Atwan
Introduction: To Open a Millennium	xiii
Stephen Jay Gould
The Tenth Muse from Harper's Magazine	1	(12)
Jacques Barzun
Turning Point from Smithsonian	13	(9)
Rudolph Chelminski
Winner Take Nothing from GQ	22	(13)
Bernard Cooper
The Countess of Stanlein Restored from Harper's Magazine	35	(31)
Nicholas Delbanco
Welcome to Cancerland from Harper's Magazine	66	(22)
Barbara Ehrenreich
My Father's Brain from The New Yorker	88	(23)
Jonathan Franzen
Final Cut from The New Yorker	111	(13)
Atul Gawande
Who We Are from Vanity Fair	124	(13)
David Halberstam
For Patriot Dreams from Vanity Fair	137	(7)
Christopher Hitchens
The Lion in Winter from National Geographic Adventure	144	(21)
Sebastian Junger
Fire from The Massachusetts Review	165	(23)
Amy Kolen
The Anti-Jefferson from The American Scholar	188	(25)
Andrew Levy
The Price We Pay from DoubleTake	213	(6)
Adam Mayblum
College: The End of the Golden Age from The New York Review of Books	219	(13)
Louis Menand
Out of the Ordinary from The Atlantic Monthly	232	(5)
Cullen Murphy
Merced from The Missouri Review	237	(16)
Danielle Ofri
Busted in New York from The New Yorker	253	(14)
Darryl Pinckney
Word on the Street from The New York Times Magazine	267	(9)
Richard Price
Anne Hudson-Price
Matriculation Fixation from The New York Times Education Life	276	(4)
Joe Queenan
Inside the Bunker from Esquire	280	(15)
John Sack
Why Literature? From The New Republic	295	(14)
Mario Vargas Llosa
The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh from Vanity Fair	309	(22)
Gore Vidal
The Dramaturgy of Death from The New York Review of Books	331	(13)
Garry Wills
Moonrise from The Atlantic Monthly	344	(23)
Penny Wolfson
Biographical Notes	367	(5)
Notable Essays of 2001	372

Excerpts

Foreword "Unfortunately, there's some very bad news," Stephen Jay Gould announced at the end of last March while leaving a message on my answering machine to say that he had completed making all the final selections for this year's book. He added that he would be checking into the hospital the following Monday for what he fully expected would be "a quite serious procedure." Less than two months later, this truly amazing person would be gone. He promised to finish the introduction before undergoing the surgery. And he did. A native New Yorker, who at the time lived within a mile of Ground Zero, Gould had been emotionally devastated by the terrorist assault of September 11, 2001 - which as he notes in his introduction came one hundred years to the day after his grandfather landed at Ellis Island. Gould had planned to commemorate his family's centennial on that day by visiting his grandfather's site of entry. Almost immediately after the attacks, he wrote four short, reflective essays on 9/11 that he managed to include in his last collection, I Have Landed, which appeared shortly before his death. Although he saw the attacks as an instance of "spectacularly destructive evil," he optimistically believed that the terrorist "vision of inspired fear" would never prevail over the "overwhelming weight of human decency" we find everywhere around us. As he read through the one hundred or so essays I'd sent him, Gould at one point observed how everything seemed "shaped by 9/11," regardless of whether an essay was written before or after. Later, I realized how every few years, ever since I launched this annual essay series in 1985, some pivotal event dominates the national attention and dramatically narrows our literary scope. In 1995 it seemed that half the essays I read dealt either directly or tangentially with the O. J. Simpson trial. The nation couldn't stop talking about it, and many distinguished writers weighed in with insightful and sometimes brilliant commentary. Something similar occurred toward the end of 2000, when the American political process was put on hold during the most bizarre presidential election in our history. Yet coverage of these events - as influential and absorbing as they still are - did not necessarily find their way into the volumes that featured the best essays of those years. But the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath were altogether another story. The written response was overwhelming, and not merely because of the massive news coverage that instantly went into operation. The coverage, commentary, and reportage one could expect; what was unexpected was their astonishingly high quality. I had assumed that thoughtful essays would take months of reflection and deliberation, that the "literature of 9/11" was several years away. I was surprised to see it taking shape before my eyes. As Stephen Jay Gould mentions in his introduction, we could have assembled an entire volume of 9/11 essays. Perhaps two or three volumes, I should add. And yet, when I consider the responses to 9/11 more carefully, I realize that I should have expected an abundance of fine essays. The essay always seems to revitalize in times of war and conflict - and it's usually with the return of peace and prosperity that fiction and poetry renew their literary stature. The First World War resulted in an eruption of essays and introduced the work of some of our finest nonfiction writers, many of whom, like Randolph Bourne, took up the pacifist cause. Then the postwar years saw the flourishing of some of our most celebrated poets and novelists, those members of the "