The Best American Essays 2002

by Gould, Stephen Jay; Atwan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780618213887
• ISBN10: 0618213880
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Since 1986, the Best American Essays series has gathered the best nonfiction writing of the year and established itself as the best-selling anthology of its kind. The Best American Essays 2002 is edited by Stephen Jay Gould, a preeminent scientist and distinguished writer on evolution and other topics. His writings include The Mismeasure of Man, winner of 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.

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

Contents

Foreword by Robert Atwan viii
Introduction: To Open a Millennium by Stephen Jay Gould xiii

Jacques Barzun. The Tenth Muse 1
from Harper’s Magazine

Rudolph Chelminski. Turning Point 13
from Smithsonian

Bernard Cooper. Winner Take Nothing 22
from GQ

Nicholas Delbanco. The Countess of Stanlein Restored 35
from Harper’s Magazine

Barbara Ehrenreich. Welcome to Cancerland 66
from Harper’s Magazine

Jonathan Franzen. My Father’s Brain 88
from The New Yorker

Atul Gawande. Final Cut 111
from The New Yorker

David Halberstam. Who We Are 124
from Vanity Fair

Christopher Hitchens. For Patriot Dreams 137
from Vanity Fair

Sebastian Junger. The Lion in Winter 144
from National Geographic Adventure

Amy Kolen. Fire 165
from The Massachusetts Review

Andrew Levy. The Anti-Jefferson 188
from The American Scholar

Adam Mayblum. The Price We Pay 213
from DoubleTake

Louis Menand. College: The End of the Golden Age 219
from The New York Review of Books

Cullen Murphy. Out of the Ordinary 232
from The Atlantic Monthly

Danielle Ofri. Merced 237
from The Missouri Review

Darryl Pinckney. Busted in New York 253
from The New Yorker

Richard Price and Anne Hudson-Price. Word on the
Street 267
from The New York Times Magazine

Joe Queenan. Matriculation Fixation 276
from The New York Times Education Life

John Sack. Inside the Bunker 280
from Esquire

Mario Vargas Llosa. Why Literature? 295
from The New Republic

Gore Vidal. The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh 309
from Vanity Fair

Garry Wills. The Dramaturgy of Death 331
from The New York Review of Books

Penny Wolfson. Moonrise 344
from The Atlantic Monthly

Biographical Notes 367
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 "