Wide selection of topics and authors. "Grieving" details the process of contesting denial for tenure and it is the official eponymous term for that process. "A-LOC" intersperses the author's fear of flying with her participation in a simulated crash and emergency team response for the purpose of practice for those involved. "Chapels" is a beautiful reflection by Pico Iyer on our need for quiet and remove from the world to fully be. "Patient" is a description of a college student's accident -- being run over by a bus -- and the ensuing rehabilitation. "Pearl Upward" is almost a prose poem about one young girl's experience of the Great Migration from the Delta to Chicago. Worthwhile reading all. ( )

I've really enjoyed some of the many yearly "Best American" collections, especially the "Best American Science and Nature Writing", so when I came across this 2011 collection of essays at a library sale a while back, I figured I'd give it a go, too. I have to say, my feelings about this collection are a little more mixed than they usually are about the science and nature ones. The best of the essays here are excellent. (Bridget Potter's "Lucky Girl," about her experience attempting to obtain an abortion in 1962, particularly sticks in my mind.) The rest mostly range from okay to very good, with only one that I'd unhesitatingly call bad. (That would be Bernadette Esposito's "A-LOC," which was just incoherent, and filled with ridiculous New Age claptrap to boot.) And it features a gratifyingly diverse collection of many different kinds of voices.

But even many of the very well-written essays, taken one after another, started to feel a little unsatisfying to me. There is, perhaps, a limit to my appetite for random snippets of navel-gazing from strangers, and there is quite a bit of that here. Enough of it, in fact, that one of the pieces included -- Christy Vannoy's "A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay" -- itself acknowledges and satirizes both the self-indulgence of the whole exercise and the tendency of essayists to focus squarely on their personal suffering. Which, hoo boy, do the essays here do. It really is a cavalcade of depressing events: cancer, abuse, hospitalization, dementia, violence, and death. So it's sometimes an affecting or a thought-provoking read, but never a happy one. Mind you, the essays that I think work the very best are the ones that look outward as they look inward, ones that position the writers' negative experiences in some kind of larger context, even if only implicitly. And the essays that do that most effectively probably make the entire collection worthwhile. ( )

What a superb collection of essays. While I found the subject matter almost universally interesting, I was even more amazed by the different creative forms the essays took. Very few were merely straightforward musings on a subject, many had incredibly creative constructions, helping to interweave seemingly unrelated topics. ( )

most essays were short and good. a few were dreadful ( )