A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Product Details

• Adapt: NEW
• Notes: Stamp New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• ISBN13: 9780316925280

Description

This exuberantly praised--and uproariously funny--first collection of nonfiction pieces by one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time--the author of "Infinite Jest"--"reconfirms Mr. Wallace's stature as one of his generation's preeminent talents" ("New York Times") 5-city author tour. Print ads .

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David Foster Wallace made quite a splash in 1996 with his massive novel, Infinite Jest. Now he's back with a collection of essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In addition to a razor-sharp writing style, Wallace has a mercurial mind that lights on many subjects. His seven essays travel from a state fair in Illinois to a cruise ship in the Caribbean, explore how television affects literature and what makes film auteur David Lynch tick, and deconstruct deconstructionism and find the intersection between tornadoes and tennis.

These eclectic interests are enhanced by an eye (and nose) for detail: "I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh . . ." It's evident that Wallace revels in both the life of the mind and the peculiarities of his fellows; in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again he celebrates both.

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Customer Reviews

Just great writing
This is some of the best writing I've ever encountered, fiction or nonfiction, on any topic. I can't recommend it highly enough.

2010-02-07 (Brooklyn, NY United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Life, the Universe, and Tennis
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a collection of seven non-fiction pieces written by David Foster Wallace that appeared in various magazines and journals in the early '90s, presented in this book in their "uncut" forms. Just to give you an idea of how different some of these are from their previously published versions: at a reading of the Illinois State Fair piece, Wallace says that the piece originally appeared in Harper's in "extremely attenuated form".

While the ostensible subjects of the essays are Wallace's early years in the Midwest, the effects of television on fiction in the U.S., a visit to the Illinois State Fair, a book on literary criticism discussing the "death of the author", the career of a world-class but not yet superstar tennis player, David Lynch's work and what it was like to be on the set of Lost Highway, and a seven night cruise in the Caribbean, these essays are filled with wonderful observations and digressions that cover much more than the original subjects.

For example, in the cruise essay a main theme of excess and insatiable indulgence quickly develops, and there are digressions on artistic advertisements, ingenuous communication, and self-conscious behavior. In addressing the effects of television on literature in the U.S., Wallace also addresses how television pervasively affects life in general. In the Michael Joyce essay: feelings of self-worth when confronting the best of the best, choice and desire, the beauty of tennis. The David Lynch essay: the general audience's desire for dichotomy (especially good vs. evil) in stories, how Blue Velvet affected Wallace and some of his peers. Just to name a few.

And there are, as you've probably read or heard, numerous humorous (often hilarious) digressions and observations throughout. I don't want to overshadow the serious and profound parts of Wallace's work with them in this review, but I will say that there are many laughs to be had, and I felt that there was a nice balance of humor and cogitation.

Although the essays cover a wide range of subjects, they are not entirely unconnected; there are certain themes present throughout. American experience and how it is shaped and affected by consumerism and media is a big one. Self-consciousness is pretty pervasive, whether Wallace is discussing self-conscious art, his own self-conscious behavior, or even writing in a self-conscious manner about how the very text he is writing may be cut out by editors later on. Ironic/cynical behavior is huge in E Unibus Pluram and makes a few appearances in the other essays, art and its function is discussed a few times, and so on.

The upshot of all this is that the book as a whole addresses some of the most relevant and important issues of our time. I really enjoyed it. I know I will read it again. Knowing that different people can read the same book and come up with wildly different interpretations of it, I obviously can't guarantee that everyone will enjoy this book, but I would still recommend that they at least try to read it. Let me rephrase that so that my caution doesn't detract from your idea of how highly I regard this book: I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

2010-01-17 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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spectacular prose
If you like bravura prose this is a must-read; if your taste runs to short, affect-less little sentences don't bother, this is not the book for you. How good is good? This good: the essay on the tennis pro is so moving, profound, and brilliantly crafted you'll want to read it twice in a row, even if you cultivate an active dislike for sports in general and athletes in particular, as I do. The essay on the Illinois state fair is so vivid, intense, funny, sad, and deep that you'll not only feel you've been there, but been there on the hallucinogen of the gods. The Caribbean cruise essay is a meditation on pleasure, profit, and unhappiness, and the link between them, but the descriptions are so evocative (a cloudy sky is "the color of old dimes") and hilarious that you hardly notice the unfathomable depths you've been taken to. That said, honesty compels me to admit that some of the essays are only so-so, and you can see why some reviewers marked the book down because of them. But the good ones are so very good they sustain a claim that Wallace remains the most exciting American writer since Nabokov and Capote.

2009-12-15 (Washington, DC) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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This man was (was, unfortunately) very smart and funny
DFW has a peculiar way of writing, with incomprehensible abbreviations and footnotes that are not really footnotes but mini-essays within essays. Every observations he makes is extremely accurate, often piss-in-your-pants funny and very well couched. His sentences often run for a whole paragraph and will send you to your dictionary many times over. Sometimes you'll have to make out the words for yourself as they are not in the dictionary and were ''collaged'' together by DFW.

The title essay, `A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' is one of the best humour piece I've ever read. That one alone was worth the price of the book, as people say (and I say it too) for its accurate social observation and self-deprecating humour. In this essay, David Foster Wallace was delightfully neurotic; the snotty intellectual, semi-agoraphobic, sensitive to imbeciles, hyper self-conscious and socially aware undercover writer who goes on a cruise for the wealthy and, we assume, superficial people. I couldn't stop laughing every single page, even in the subway. Another piece tells of DFW visiting the Illinois State Fair. Now he is slightly more in his element because he is back to the area in which he grew up but just as snotty and funny as in the title essay.

Other pieces discuss David Lynch's work using tidbits of trivia and personal observation of one of his movie set (did you know Lynch pisses in the open air all the time?), an analysis of self-referential TV and fiction in the age before internet and two essays on his experience of learning tennis in windy Illinois and of watching a tennis competition in Montreal, my hometown, where I realized that his observation that we call pop `gazeous beverage' in French is right on but sounds weird in English.
You might not be interested in all essays (the ones on tennis left me rather indifferent) as they are widely varied journalistic pieces that were put together for this book but, surely, at least two will grab your attention even if you don't know the last things about raising pigs in Illinois. Also, for those who want to tackle Infinite Jest, this will give you an idea of DFW's style before you commit to the 1000 pages brick. So, 5 stars for the title piece but 4 stars for the whole thing.

David Foster Wallace, I hope you are happier where you are now. Too bad you are gone.

2009-04-19 (Québec) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Four stars, we should all be madam psychosis for this guy
I already new I loved this author (DFW) I bought this for a gift this time. He's the best author of his generation and is better than Pynchon who is of the similar style, but a little raunchy for my taste, Wallace had beautiful big glowing standards without being superior with any high minded morality and never preaches and doesn't go over the top with all the dark black empathetic self pitying sentimentality (like Denis Jonson who gets a little gooey, which there is nothing wrong with and he was my favorite next to Pynchon until DFW) but DFW still flagrantly enjoys all the narcissism, makes you feel like narcissism is almost the only thing holding society together, which I guess that's my darkest fantasy. The best novel to start with with Wallace is Broom of the System if you enjoy novels. I was completely hooked and read everything he did after that. Infinite Jest is a work without equal in scope and style and I can't be glowing enough about this guy. It's not just the humor, which I'm a complete sucker for, but that seems secondary, it's just everything about him. I keep looking around for anyone of his caliber alive or dead and can't find anyone. I saw him with a panel of other authors on Charlie Rose and I think he was with the guy who did Everything is Illuminated which I loved but he did rip off Saul Bellow a little, but the Everything is Illuminated guy is better, I thought. No one comes close to Wallace though, he did just what he set out to do with the caviar for the average reader and was just a brilliant success. I've gone back to Samuel Becket in despair, which is comfortable but I need something else. I've tried Cioran but that's too much antiquated thinking, but I like the fervent rashness of Cioran I just prefer someone a little more cerebral. I wish Wallace just kept ignoring how bad life sucks and discovered how relentless pessimism really can save us all if he were just alive at least all his fans could be giggling at all this negativity.

2009-02-27 (Santa Barbara CA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Oblivion: Stories

Product Details

• Environment: USED - VERY GOOD
• ISBN13: 9780316010764
• Notes:

Description

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

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Customer Reviews

Read this to study for the GRE, but not to be entertained
This is fiction of a style I would label A.D.D. prose: there is very little action yet we spend pages reading about dribbly insignificant details. It is easy to lose focus while reading this book. Wallace writes sublimely detailed sketches of the characters, but it is only a still life; there is no action, no dimension. The one redeeming quality is the English of this book; extremely erudite, it is like reading a dictionary.

2008-01-26 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Please enter a title for your review
*contains spoilers?*
where the vast majority of "literary fiction" writers say to themselves "i need some detail to add color to this scene, what's a generic characteristic that would be apparent and what's the best way to allude to it possessing overlooked significance?", Wallace finds and focusses on the details that are actually interesting and thus only needs to describe them in an objective rather than poetic way demonstrating the irrelevance of poetic descriptions when you have enough of a sense of reality to find the facts that define the nature of a situation and let them speak for themselves.
i felt like most of the writing in the first half of this book consistently paid off with a new idea that built on the previous ones every second or third sentence. i was too engaged by the minor immediate payoffs to even be anticpating an ultimate ending crescendo. i struggled to find any ideas that could hook me in the second half though, which is the same experience i had with Infinite Jest. all the faults of that previous novel are equally apparent here, the progressively increasing reliance on suspense to hold reader attention and excluding or vaguely implying the most relevant information.
the title story Oblivion is a non-linear minefield of half-ideas with a conclusion seemingly consisting (although i could be completely wrong) of the "...and it was all a dream" twilight zone ending. the cryptic style is perhaps designed to represent a dream, but since all his writing has included an element of surrealism it isn't different enough from his other stories for the intention to be apparent even retrospectively.
The Suffering Channel is alternating boring and frustrasting, spending all of it's 90 pages raising question after question that are never answered and dragging out the suspense with the kind of banal detail that can only be called padding, something DFW clearly knows better than to use. the minor philisophical ideas never go beyond surface level kneejerk reactions, something that, again, DFW clearly knows better than to use.
just like Infinite Jest half of it blew me away but i couldn't see how the same writer could take any pride in the lesser half.

2008-01-09 | pancake_repairman (gfjdhgfjhgj) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Brilliant
The best collection of short fiction from the best living writer in the English language. It demands patience and attention, but the rewards for the effort are incredible. The best story in the collection is Good Old Neon, which is bifercated (by use of footnotes), such that there are two distinct endings, both of which would qualify the story as probably the best I have read this year.
These stories coil and bend, and the sentences are often labyrinthine; casual reading really won't suffice. If you do put forth the effort, I think you'll find that they engage the mind and that other thing, whatever it may be, that makes us what we call "human." Truly an outstanding collection.

2006-12-21 (The Lifeworld) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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I go back to it fairly frequently
Pissed off at the mindnumbing aspects of television, I found this collection of stories to be a breath of fresh air showing me the power and scope of what fiction writing can be when someone courageous enough will put in the work. You can trust Wallace to know what the heck he's writing about, just don't think too hard about it - like television - enjoy it and the words and ideas in each story will, in the end, make you glad you did, unlike television. I especially enjoy 'Good Old Neon' and 'Another Pioneer'.

2006-05-18 | Rabel (OR) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Missing Something
First, let me say I absolutely LOVE reading David Foster Wallace. This collection showcases one of his strengths: the attention to detail - or, more accurately - the minutiae - of everyday thoughts; how, for example, three minutes of a day can only be captured by pages & pages & pages of prose, because the human brain simultaneously functions on so many levels (best illustrated when you find yourself listening to someone attempting to explain 'the dream I had last night' but use so many qualifiers that a dream that lasts for probably no more than one minute absorbs the conversation of an entire lunch - or as least smoke break).

Ultimately, though, I found myself wishing a strong editorial voice would have confronted Wallace on several counts prior to the publishing of 'Oblivion.' This is especially true with the first story, 'Mister Squishy,' which seems to build up to a crescendo that is never reached. Wallace weaves together several different narratives into what the reader expects to come together at some point, but instead the story just...ends.

'The Suffering Channel' is a lost opportunity of amazing proportions. In this story, a highly engaging tale begins - and the reader falls into it helplessly, increasingly curious as to what it all means and where it's all going. Yet, instead of reaching a conclusion, or really any sort of resting point, the story abruptly ends. I wondered if the printer had left out pages & pages of the book, and I fought against the urge to hurl it across the room.

I absolutely love Wallace's amazing & rare gifts. But what 'Oblivion' shows is a 'writer's writer.' These stories are partial projects, not stories. They are, at best, extremely well fleshed-out beginnings.

It's a joy to read the words of someone with such innate talent, with such incredible gifts with the written word, but to me what we're left with is just one-half of a whole. Most of these stories end so abruptly, one can scarcely even call them a 'slice of life' because they consistently refer to past or future events that are never quite clear or explained. It's not that I'm left frustrated because 'I want to know what happened.' I'm frustrated because what could have been three or four great full-length novels were robbed.

I will always read Wallace because it is an incredibly intense & enjoyable experience. But I probably would not recommend this book to anyone I know because it is so unfulfilling and ultimately disappointing.

I guess 'Oblivion' can be classified as 'experimental' fiction or non-narrative storytelling, but Wallace is capable of so much more than that, as we have seen in the past, as we will hopefully see in the future, & as even 'Oblivion' attests.

2005-10-24 | popjunkie (Atlanta, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 3

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Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Product Details

• Notes: Type New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• ISBN13: 9780316013321
• Train: NEW

Description

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

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Customer Reviews

hard to put down
I sailed through this marvelous book of essays. It's a small victory for Wallace that he can keep someone as ADD as me engaged through essays on everything from literary theory to lobster festivals.

2010-01-06 (Provo, UT) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A true Talent
Consider the Lobster is a collection of muscular essays from the late David Foster Wallace on an absurdly wide range of topics. Each of them was commissioned by a particular magazine with a particular topic, hence Wallace's tendency to direct his voice at his readers like a canon. However, Wallace can never be contained by the banalities of his topic here. His work on the AVA's is a particularly damning portrait of the pornography industry, in all its unimaginable insanity and sadness. I particularly like the piece on the American Usage Wars, which involves an impressive demonstration of Wallace's knowledge regarding the history of English grammar debates over the course of the last several decades. Not all of the pieces here are great-the one on McCain in particular is repetitive and mundane. And DFW's tendency to use lengthy footnotes to 'fragment the linearity' of his text is a mere affectation. Still, this represents the work of a great mind, whose creativity and intellect will sorely be missed.

2010-01-05 (New York) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Wallace at his best
David Foster Wallace reachs new heights in this brilliant collection of essays. Although uneven, as is much of his work, the best of these essays set new recent standards for this art form. In the finest works of this collection, he truly does achieve art with non-fiction writing. Imagine a critique of a new academic work on English grammar usage that is too fascinating to put down, and frequently too humorous to not have to stop reading while your laughter subsides. His points are made without his ever becoming preachy, and are all the more convincing for it (c.f. the title essay). His mastery of understatement serves to place a new emphasis on events of chilling importance by observation of events seemingly mundane.
His use of sarcasm and irony when appropriate remains as adroit as ever.

For those who are already Wallace fans, I recommend this as my favorite of his collections of non-fiction. For those who have never encountered him before, I think this is the best introduction to his non-fiction work (and that is high praise indeed, as his other collections are wonderful).

This book serves to remind us of the tragic loss to American arts and letters caused by Wallace's untimely passing. I mourn his absence, and am deeply saddened by the void he leaves behind. Treasure these works, he was unique and nothing quite like him will come again.

LJS

2010-01-03 (Highland Park, Illinois United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Journalism, not essays
These pieces do not earn the category "essay". They read like the journalism that they were. I watched Wallace a few nights ago in a 1990s Charlie Rose interview and felt connected to this bright young man. But he writes too casually, letting any thought get into the narrative. The endless digressions sap the energy of the text. I understand that his novels are that way too (i e endlessly digressive). How sad that he was unable to overcome his depression. Maybe he would have matured into a more disciplined writer.

2009-12-08 (.) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Missing one key piece...
DFW's content is not the object of this review. Rather, I am reviewing (and objecting to) the Kindle version of the book, which does not include the marvelous essay, "Host." Although I (now) understand that the article in its original form used sidenotes that cannot be duplicated in the eBook format, it would have been nice to know that before hunting through the publication notes on my Kindle to discover this. It seems that either the sidenotes could be changed to footnotes and so duplicated, or the publisher and Amazon could let me know that what I am buying is a somewhat diminished version of the book.

2009-08-27 (Haslett, MI) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780316068222
• Adapt: NEW
• Notes: Trade mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Description

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

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Customer Reviews

Nice speech but not a book
Nutshell review - This book is, as mentioned on the book's Amazon page, the commencement address given by the author in 2005 at Kenyon College. It is thus a very short book with most of its 130 or so pages containing just a line or two (the average page contains less than this review). The central message is awareness - staying aware to your life and, by doing so, cultivating compassion. Living a life purposefully and not unconsciously letting it all pass you by. There are, of course, many books that explore this issue in greater depth. I think it is a good commencement speech but don't believe it warranted a book and the accompanying price tag. Ultimately you cannot help thinking that the publishers have exploited the content.

2010-01-01 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Worth Keeping in Your Back Pocket
My sister gave me this book about a month ago for my birthday. I had read it a long time ago on the internet, but I'd just scanned over it with mild interest and quickly had forgotten it.

I was a fool, of course, that time I read it. I'd done exactly what Wallace so eloquently warns against in "This is Water." I'd read it while entrapped within the prison of my self-concern. I had read it without full mindfulness, in a rush to move on to other things. And look what I had missed.

It's a beautiful book that reminds us of truths that float around us in many forms (he points out cliches) but that we somehow never seem fully to grasp. Wallace reminds us that if we live unconsciously, according to the default settings that focus on ourselves, we can end up living cynical and bitter lives. He instead urges awareness, so that we may experience even the most banal of experiences as "not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things..."

Like I said, it's a beautiful book that I find worth reading over and over, just to remind myself, again, to pay attention.

One more note. I do very much appreciate the book form This is Water takes. The small volume is attractive. The speech is published with one sentence per page which serves to help the reader enact the skills that Wallace so urges in the book: awareness and thoughtfulness. It's a perfect example of form matching content, and even if This is Water is still available for free online, the book is well worth the cost.

2009-10-25 (Winters, TX) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Save your Money and buy the BANRR 2005!!!
This speech (as well as a lot of other awesome stories, articles, essays, quotes, first-lines, jokes) is included in the 2005 Best American Non-Required reading, which was edited by Dave Eggers.

[...]

Spend less money, and get a lot more out of it!

By the way, the speech is a great speech. You really should check it out.

2009-09-24 (Richmond, IN) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Audio Version
First of all, this commencement address, in whatever form, is worth the price. I have the book form, or at least, did. Evidently my 18 year old took it with him to college.

Now, the audio form. From Audible. It is read by Wallace's sister, Amy, which I find distracting because:

(1) Wallace was not a woman and this is a first person address which should be read by a man. And don't give me any sexist equality nonsense on this. This speech is delivered from a man's POV, not a woman's. It's not something that is gender specific, but in my view, it is not something expressed in a way that a woman would express it.

Actually, since there is, as I understand it, an actually video of DFW reading it himself, there's no reason that the audio, however poor, should not have been stripped, enhanced, and sold instead of Amy's reading;

and (2) Amy "reads" it rather than "delivers" it. You can tell the difference. This reading requires an actor, or at least an actress, not a reader.

But still. This is the commencement speech your child should hear or read BEFORE going off to college. And after. And every year thereafter.

You, too.

2009-08-31 (Near the Lake) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Gift
This speech is a generous gift delivered by a deeply troubled and pained person of unusual intelligence. And while this is an address to graduates, it seems to me that he speaks, in a way, to try to convince himself too. He says,

"...there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think."

He's talking about existence, and the freedom to love. And to love is to rebel against periods of depression and unhappy listlessness and repetition and pain and absurdity, to care about others and to sacrifice. It's a Sisyphean existence. I subscribe to that. The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. I think Camus said that.

2009-08-19 (San Francisco, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope

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• Notes: Disgrace New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Working order: NEW
• ISBN13: 9780316040532

Description

Is John McCain "For Real?"


That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest." And many young Americans were beginning to take notice.


To get at "something riveting and unspinnable and true" about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man.

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Customer Reviews

Insightful in the light of the '08 campaign
If you're a fan of David Foster Wallace's nonfiction, I think this is probably a must-read. It faces squarely off against his fascinations with issues of ethics and authenticity, and shows him in a troubled frame of mind. I can't say how much editing was done recently, but this is technically the last book he published before his death so it's also got that grim recommendation.

By turns it's uncomfortably funny and fascinating, and it paints a portrait of McCain that's remarkably insightful in the light of the recent campaign. It's DFW at the top of his nonfiction game.

2008-12-19 (rochester ny usa) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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not timely after '08
...this essay, wonderful as it is, is a little outdated and, now, some of the things that DFW has written about mccain are patently false (eg: being locked in a box in the hanoi hilton for 4 years. yes, he was there, but he was not kept "in a box" every single day, as dfw says.) it's interesting, too, that this was written on assignment for rolling stone back in '99. contrast this with Mat Taibbi's RS article of this year, "mccain: the fake maverick."

that said, i love, love, love DFW's writing, and am so sad he is gone. purchase "consider the lobster" to get a more fully-rounded DFW experience. this essay is included there.

2008-11-26 (Chicago) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Originally from Consider the Lobster
So if you have any interest in his other essays, read that book instead of this one. While this is not a bad essay, note the timing of its re-release during a year when McCain is running for the Presidency of the US. Note also that Wallace, recently deceased, had changed his opinion of McCain, as per an interview he gave in May 2008: [...]

2008-09-16 | devoted reader (Upstate, NY) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 2

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i didn't read the book
but author david foster wallace committed suicide two days ago. not sure what that says about the current state of presidential politics, if anything. rest in peace, david. a huge loss.

2008-09-14 (New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 3

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Important to know the context of this book was 2000, not 2008
Given DFW's recent tragic death (and the election timing of this re-release), I'd imagine alot of folks may now discover this book. What Wallace wanted current readers understand about the context, he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview from June 2008. Here's the excerpt:

"The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now--for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course--he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing. As part of the essay talks about, there's an enormous difference between running an insurgent Hail-Mary-type longshot campaign and being a viable candidate (it was right around New Hampshire in 2000 that McCain began to change from the former to the latter), and there are some deep, really rather troubling questions about whether serious honor and candor and principle remain possible for someone who wants to really maybe win. I wouldn't take back anything that got said in that essay, but I'd want a reader to keep the time and context very much in mind on every page."

2008-09-14 | guitar funk (Seattle) | Helpful Votes: 42 | Rating: 4

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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

Description

One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math's most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity. Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor's counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology. Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.

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Before discussing the merits of David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, it is essential to define what the book is not. This volume in the "Great Discoveries" series is not a history of the personalities and social conditions that led to the "discovery" of infinity. Nor is it a narrative fixated on the cultish fear of--and obsession with--the infinite that has seemingly driven mathematicians insane over the centuries. Rather, Everything and More is a surprisingly rigorous march through the 2000 plus years of mathematical research that began with Aristotle; continued through Galileo, Isaac Newton, G.W. Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and J.W.R. Dedekind; and culminated in Georg Cantor and his Set Theory. The task Wallace (author of the bestseller Infinite Jest and other fiction) has set himself is enormously challenging: without radically compromising the complexity of the philosophy, metaphysics, or mathematics that underlies the evolving concept of infinity, present the material to a lay audience in a manner that is entertaining. To propel his narrative, Wallace even develops a style that mirrors the mathematical language he probes. One difficulty in his focus on concepts and not a strict human chronology, though, is that his structure is dependent on frequent digressions (especially early on). Patience is required. Wallace demands that his reader walk through the equations, study the graphs and charts, and relearn college-level concepts to follow along on the exploration. Indeed, after one wrenching dip into Zeno’s paradoxes, Wallace spouts at his imagined complaining audience: "Deal." But the book should be deemed a success. If one grants him the attention he requires, Wallace has made the trip richly rewarding. --Patrick O’Kelley

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Customer Reviews

I slobber some when I talk
this book makes crazy on my face. very nice and getting good product of clean with no faults. No, really, I'm quite happy with the purchase , the author, the seller, your site, my life, my head space and most of all: you, reading this.

2010-01-26 | Halation (Chicago) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Infinite Wallace
David Foster Wallace's "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity" is a rare achievement. He has written a compelling and entertaining popular math book that illuminates a difficult subject. The important concepts, no matter how difficult, are explained in a fashion that is understandable by even those without advanced degrees in mathematics.

For thoughtful, engaged readers Wallace elevates and enlightens. I thoroughly recommend this book to all.

2009-01-24 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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So long and thanks for all the footnotes...
Since DFW has committed suicide, we will not see an edition revised by him. In re-reading the reviews, it appears that style means a lot. I personally found the book witty. It was a little slow sometimes because of the convolutions he introduced in style, but mostly I kept plowing (and chuckling) through. The librarian who sent back the book did a disservice to some readers. Not everyone likes to learn in the same way. With that kind of attitude, many years ago I would have had Rudin's books removed as too concise to be useful. Of course, there are many mathematicians who love those books for just that reason, and I would have done them a disservice.

I am a physicist with a math minor. To me, the best part of this book was his explanation of why mathematicians insist on the epsilon-deltas of mathematical rigor. No one ever did that before. If I could have read this in high school, I probably would have finished my math major as well as my physics major. Instead, the whole epsilon-delta thing seemed ad-hoc and inexplicable in purpose. I could never accept the need for rigor demanded in advanced analysis.(a drunken prof and Rudin's book didn't help either) DFW showed how a crisis in dealing with the infinite and with infinitesmals led to the development of the what we call the foundations of analysis. Just excellent.

I envied him his high school math teacher, who seems responsible for much of the really good parts of this book. No, DFW wasn't a mathematician and he (in spite of what some reviewers seem to think) knew it. He made clear that he wouldn't be able to do justice to Godel. But incompleteness is moderate difficult. DFW didn't know much about Fourier series, but did know they were important enough to mention.
For some students, that's the way to get them interested, just mention something and let them go dig (so much easier now with the internet).

Remember the subtitle -- a compact history of infinity. So it is more history oriented than a mathematical tome. I had recently read Lillian R. Lieber's Infinity (which I see has been reprinted) and it has her sparse, but excellent development of the concepts. It doesn't have much historical detail though. So everything and more was a pleasure.

2008-09-15 | Baslim (Ventura County, California) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 4

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Worst-written book I have ever read.
I was expecting an exciting book.
I was disappointed.
This book has no chapters, lots of text message abbreviations, and many phrases ending in a period.

Three-quarters of this book is background information.

When the payoff comes, actually talking about infinities,
the reationship among alelf null, cardinality c, and alef 1
is left as a "problem for the reader" for 20 pages!

2008-06-25 (Berkeley Hts, NJ) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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Everything and Less.
I (and many of my professional scientist colleagues) thought Gleick's "Chaos" was one of the worst books ever written on math - so confusing and uninstructive it called the whole subject into question. So it is not surprising Gleick praises this book: it is worse than "Chaos". The grammar, punctuation, and style are so tangled I found myself rereading passage after passage to sort out Wallace's meaning. He uses dozens of obscure, undefined, unusual, and unobvious abbreviations, with the index to them lost in the text, and no index at all to the book as a whole, which is very negligent for a technical work. There is no organization into chapters, just numbered sections which do not coincide with any natural divisions in the material. "Stream-of-consciousness" writing may do for Joyce (though he was not known for lucidity), but it is hopeless for presenting technical material. Many of Wallace's explanations explain nothing: "Fourier Series is vital to understanding transfinite math", he writes, and then blows the subject off with a jest (p 115). And there are plain errors: "when n<0, (p+q)^n becomes the Binomial Theorem" (p 117). Finally, the subject-matter itself is questionable: modern mathematicians still regard infinity as an intractable concept that leads to preposterous contradictions, as Archimedes and Galileo found and as Wallace's own examples demonstrate. "Is the area of an infinitely-long and wide sheet of paper infinity squared?" "Are some infinities bigger than others?" If questions like these have cogent answers at all, it is going to take someone more coherent than Wallace to explain them.

2008-03-31 (Princeton, NJ USA) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 1

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