How We Speak to One Another

Essays were once my favorite form of reading when the writing covered a subject succinctly and offered the author’s point of view. In this collection of more than fifty essays of varying length from one to several pages and from authors with different agendas, the reader is offered a mixed bag of articles to sample. Essays can take different forms, and several engage the graphic form, another employs the question/answer format of interviewer and interviewee, some try to be witty, satirical, timely, and a few dwell on serious themes. For the most part, too many of these articles reflect the self absorption of the author and the ideas are lost in the vacuous prose. Topics range from baseball to book reviews, language, writing, essays, courage, memoirs, and other sundry topics.

The essays are arranged in no particular order, and the reader can browse through the selections at random. This collection reveals many of the different forms used in essay writing, from the informal, where the author’s personality dominates the discourse, to the formal, where a theme is seriously deliberated. The former demands a gifted writer, and the latter is filled with more substance. This compendium could use more structure along with better essence.