The Best American Essays 2000 [Paperback]

Best-selling author Alan Lightman selects the year’s finest nonfiction as this acclaimed series celebrates its fifteenth year. He has chosen a diverse, very personal collection that celebrates the essay as an independent genre unlike any other. This year’s pieces embrace stylistic freedom and strong opinions and afford the reader a fascinating view of the writer’s mind as it struggles with truth, memory, and experience. Featured writers include Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Mary Gordon, Edwidge Danticat, and others.

Best-selling author Alan Lightman selects the year’s finest nonfiction as this acclaimed series celebrates its fifteenth year. He has chosen a diverse, very personal collection that celebrates the essay as an independent genre unlike any other. This year’s pieces embrace stylistic freedom and strong opinions and afford the reader a fascinating view of the writer’s mind as it struggles with truth, memory, and experience. Featured writers include Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Mary Gordon, Edwidge Danticat, and others.

Alan Lightman makes his mark on the “always outstanding collection [that] seems to outdo itself each year.

Boston Globe

Introduction

Last winter, at the end of December, my family and friends rented neighboring apartments on an island off Florida and waited together for the new millennium. We came from Massachusetts and Connecticut, Maryland and South Carolina, all of us sensing some cosmic event. For the past twenty-five years, we had been visiting each other at birthdays, naming ceremonies, the deaths of parents, bat mitzvahs, postmortems of love affairs gone bad.
An island off the coast of Florida is an ideal spot to ponder the meaning of one thousand years. First of all, you’re cut off from the rest of the world and its day-to-day rumblings. For a millennium-size view, you need distance and sl£Ç