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This is the inaugural volume of the Best American Essays series, which has celebrated the best annual essay writing for forty consecutive years. This one showcases the essayistic talent of some literary icons in their heyday: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Jay Gould, Julian Barnes, and Cynthia Ozick, among others.
Many of the collected pieces here failed to stand the test of time, but there were exceptions. I loved On Boxing, which I read as part of a larger collection by Joyce Carol Oates (see my review). And The First Day of School by Cynthia Ozick was a wonderful, evocative essay about the excitement and nerves of the first days of college at NYU’s Washington Square campus in the 1940s.
The standout for me was Kai Erikson’s Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters, where he muses about the deliberations leading up to the decision to drop atomic bombs on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Why not a test on some uninhabited part of Japan to demonstrate the awesome power?
There is no law of nature that compels a winning side to press its superiority, but it is hard to slow down, hard to relinquish an advantage, hard to rein the fury. The impulse to charge ahead, to strike at the throat, is so strong a habit of war that it almost ranks as a reflex, and if that thought does not frighten us when we consider our present nuclear predicament, nothing will. Many a casual slaughter can emerge from such moods.
Kai Erikson, Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters
The notion that humans have a natural, unstoppable killer instinct is a depressing but plausible conclusion.