Best American Essays (concluded)

Annie Dillard. "Total Eclipse." 1982. Impressions of the world as it looks during a total eclipse of the sun. The world no longer looks ordinary, setting off reflections on that changed world. A dead world. The world when the sun burns out. But then the eclipse is over and people hurry back to the now familiar world of their daily lives.

Cynthia Ozick. "A Drugstore in Winter." 1982. The author tells how she became a writer--through reading. Beginning with a lending library in her father's drug store, all kinds of people either gave her or loaned her books and she consumed all of them.

William Manchester. "Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All." 1987. Manchester vividly describes the conditions under which his company of marines fought on Okinawa, the island from which, if there had been no atomic bombs, the invasion of mainland Japan would have been launched. The statistics of loss are staggering, more than Hiroshima, more Americans than at Gettysburg. He pleads for Americans to remember those who died in war on Memorial Day. And he makes it clear that he has not forgiven the Japanese for what they did to his friends and fellow marines and to him personally. I think this essay should be read aloud at Memorial Day ceremonies. Americans need to understand the realities of war. They need to appreciate the conditions under which those who gave their lives--and those who survived--fought.

Edward Hoagland. "Heaven and Nature." 1988. Reflections on committing suicide.

Stephen Jay Gould. "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown." 1989. The author believes that people prefer "creation myths" to the reality that most phenomena evolve. Baseball is an example. It was not started by Abner Doubleday, a man who didn't "know a baseball from a kumquat." It evolved from primitive stick-and-ball games played by working people even before America became a British colony.

Gerald Early. "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant." 1990. Confronts the unspoken belief that white women are the image of the perfect American woman.

John Updike. "The Disposable Rocket." 1993. The author reflects on the male body and in the process contrasts it with the female's. The man's role in reproduction is like the rockets that propel the space capsule into space then fall away into the ocean. An excellent metaphor.

Saul Bellow. "Graven Images." 1997. The author reflects on the process of being photographed. He thinks that photographers try to help the public see you as you really are, as opposed to how you want to be viewed. When you are being photographed as a public figure, the battle is on between the photographee and the photographer for how you will be immortalized in public. The photographer tries to reduce the public figure to the confines of a paper or a frame that makes the public figure look like everyone else.