The Best American Essays 2003 [Paperback]

Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the most interesting and provocative writing of the year, establishing a firm place as the leading annual of its kind. The volume is edited each year by an esteemed writer who brings a fresh eye to the selections. Previous editors have included Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Geoffrey C. Ward, Cynthia Ozick, and Stephen Jay Gould. This year’s volume is terrifically diverse, with subjects ranging from driving lessons to animal rights to citizenship in times of emergency.

Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the most interesting and provocative writing of the year, establishing a firm place as the leading annual of its kind. The volume is edited each year by an esteemed writer who brings a fresh eye to the selections. Previous editors have included Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Geoffrey C. Ward, Cynthia Ozick, and Stephen Jay Gould. This year’s volume is terrifically diverse, with subjects ranging from driving lessons to animal rights to citizenship in times of emergency.

Introduction

You can tell a lot about people from the books they sleep with. Alexander the Great is said to have slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. Charlemagne slept with Saint Augustine’s The City of God. When Edwin Herbert Land, the founder of Polaroid, was a boy, he snuggled up to Robert Wood’s Physical Optics.
I used to sleep with a copy of the essays of Montaigne. It was a thick volume — 1,035 pages long, a 1933 Modern Library edition with a threadbare gray cover and a missing spine — that would have made a sizable lump under my pillow. (Those other guys must have had cast-iron cheeks. Or maybe they owned abridged versions.) Montaigne reposed on my bedside table. What our relationship lacked in propinquity it made up in constancy, since I was confined to bed twenty-four hours a day for the first eight months of a fragile pregnancy. Iló2