Best American Essays (continued)

Martin Luther Kin, Jr.: "Letter from Birmingham Jail." 1963. In a letter that I think is as eloquent as anything I have ever read, King responds to white clergymen who criticize him for engaging in nonviolent, peaceful protest that results in violence and who urge black people to wait patiently while white society adjusts to accept them. He quotes Aquinas and Martin Buber. He uses scathing logic. He uses plain statement of the treatment of blacks by whites. His message is, Why are not you, the white religious Christians, joining us in the march to justice on behalf of your black brothers to fulfill the Constitutional guarantees for its citizens?

Tom Wolfe. "Putting Daddy On." 1954. Father visits his college-dropout son, living like a hippie, to try to talk sense into him, but his language, almost unintelligible in its use of metaphors, is incapable of being understood by his son whose point of view is completely different from his dad's. The two see the world differently, summarized by the father's final comment to the narrator as they leave the son's "pad" to take a taxi: "You tell me," he says. "What could I say to him? I couldn't say anything to him. I threw out everything I had. I couldn't make anything skip across the pond. None of them. Not one." That is, not one of his reasons for wanting his son to return to respectable middle-class life made sense to his son.

Susan Sontag. "Notes on 'Camp.' " 1964. The best summary of "Camp" is in the last sentence: "It's good because it's awful."

Vladimir Nabokov. "Perfect Past." 1966. Reflections on the themes that emerged through writing his autobiography.

M. Scott Momaday. "The Way to Rainy Mountain." 1967. As an adult, the author reflects on his Kiowa Indian culture as he experienced it through his grandmother in his youth. The love of the sun and of nature stands out.

Elizabeth Hardwick. "The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King." 1968. The author reflects on the meaning of the death of Martin Luther King. She suggests that the Christian religion will no longer play a part in the battle for civil rights.

Michael Herr. "Illumination Rounds." 1969. Interviews and incidents in the Vietnam War. They add up to its incomprehensibility to the men who fought it. "The Intel report lay closed on the green field table and someone had scrawled, 'What does it all mean?' across the cover sheet."

Maya Angelou. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." 1970. Growing up in Stamps, Ark., the author as a young girl suffers both indignities herself and the indignity of watching her relatives as they are threatened or taunted by whites. Her mother always sang hymns to help her endure existence and to dream of relief from that existence, in God. That's why the "caged bird"sings.

Lewis Thomas. "The Lives of a Cell." 1971. The single cell with its complexity.... "...with too many working parts lacking visible connections...." is like the complexity of the earth and the earth is most like the single cell.

John McPhee. "The Search for Marvin Gardens." 1973. Contrasts Monopoly, the game, with the real world of the sordid streets and places in Atlantic City.

William H. Gass. "The Doomed in Their Sinking." 1973. Thoughts on the subject of suicide.

Alice Walker. "Looking for Zora." 1975. In looking for the place where Zora Neale Hurston was buried in Florida, the author meets a number of people who knew her. Their stories sometimes contradicted each other. But Zora's personality, her ability to look at life as it is, without tears, and her independent thinking, seem to have separated her from her family, from her husband, and from the majority of other blacks. "She was not a teary sort of person...." And she was a great writer and collector of African-American folklore, who died in poverty.

Adrienne Rich. "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying." 1977. Using the technique of Pascal's Pensees and Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, the author jots down random thoughts on the phenomenon of women and lying, which most often occurs in order to survive in a male-dominated world.

Joan Didion. "The White Album." 1979. The author tells about and reflects on her experiences in 1968, experiences with the Black Panthers and college takeovers. She summarizes by saying that another author had said he put his experiences in writing so he could find meaning in them, but she has put these experiences in writing and still finds no meaning in them. Reflects the mood of the time.

Richard Rodriguez. "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood." 1980. The author noticed that the sounds, not the words, of his native Spanish communicated intimacy with his family, that the public language English did not convey that intimacy. It's not the words, but the spirit behind the words that conveys intimacy among the family. It's not the language, per se, that communicates intimacy, but the sounds and the spirit communicated through those sounds that enclosed the world of his family.

Gretel Ehrilich. "The Solace of Open Spaces." 1981. Living in Wyoming required the author to adjust to the wide open spaces, the laconic conversations and the feeling of being sealed in by isolation. In general, space is a good thing, enabling people to welcome all kinds of ideas, whereas we in the East build obstruction against space by filling up our spaces with the things we can buy. [Compare to Giants in the Earth.]