Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A disappointing collection--quirky, self-indulgent, uneven. It is hard to imagine what kind of reader would benefit from reading this volume. Most of the essays are little more than primers on their writers or events (Farah Griffin on Morrison, Greil Marcus on Powers). Many are written by scholars rehashing in capsule form what they or others have presented more richly elsewhere--a quickie on imperialism, anyone? Some are by writers using the author or event as a springboard for meditations ranging from the trite to the clever--Hawthorne is a flimsy pretext for Mukherjee to rehearse, for the umpteenth time, her Bengali Brahmin pedigree and her revolutionary defiance in marrying a white man. Some are from unknown and mediocre scholars writing about areas from which the major scholars have been mysteriously omitted--were the editors really so clueless about these fields, or did they just subcontract these fields to friends and former graduate students? There are a couple of fine pieces--Walter Mosley on detective fiction , Ishmael Reed on Huck Finn, the essay on Linda Lovelace--but these are too few to make this a worthwhile purchase. If an anthology with over 200 pieces turns up only a handful of standouts, its claims as a "reference" book are overblown. For scholars looking at this volume as a reference, individual pieces would need to be evaluated carefully, since several are written by people who are not experts in the field.