Amazon.com Review
In 17 thoughtful essays--edited by the novelist Susan Richards Shreve and her son, the writer and University of Michigan instructor Porter Shreve--How We Want to Live follows up their 1997 anthology, Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America, with another eclectic, distinguished collection of authors--this time, defining the concept of progress as it pertains to their lives. More often than not, each author concludes that Western culture's idea of progress actually leads to regression, as we lose touch with each other, hide behind our computer and TV screens and windshields, and rely on modern conveniences to shield us from intimacy. In his own contribution, "Made by You," Porter Shreve searches to find a birthday gift for his youngest sister. He walks down a block previously filled with independently owned stores, only to find an antiseptic mall. Deborah Tannen, author of the bestselling You Just Don't Understand, considers the benefits and the shortfalls of online communication when she begins an intimate e-mail correspondence with an old college friend dying of lung cancer. And Shawn Wong explains his struggle to assert his American identity as a U.S.-born Chinese man. The tone varies from the cynical (Ishmael Reed's essay "Progress: A Faustian Bargain") to the wonderfully poignant (Pearl Abraham's "Lost Souls"), but the essays are always well wrought, inspiring readers to extend the question of the meaning of progress to their own lives. --Kera Bolonik
From Publishers Weekly
Seventeen eminent (e.g., Ishmael Reed, Bill McKibben, Alan Lightman, Alan Cheuse) and less-well-known writers ponder the elusive goal of social, global and personal progress in this mixed bag of essays. In a cogent plea for ecological sanity, Kirkpatrick Sale critiques a high-tech, expansionist global economy that gobbles up resources and creates unabating pollution while increasing the inequalities between the wealthy few and the billions of poor. Annie Dillard, in a wrenching examination of our emotional numbness to large-scale human tragedies, sketches a cosmic perspective on the cycle of life and death, with the aim of restoring a sense of each individual's importance. Nicholas Delbanco claims that the ethos of America is inextricably linked to the idea of forward motion and to ideals of self-improvement and self-reliance. But, he argues, "sideways motion equally may represent advance." Other contributors take a much more personal tack, defining progress so vaguely that the essays lose coherence. Poet Susan Wood tells how psychoanalysis helped her overcome recurrent nightmares, sleepwalking and writer's block; John Barth serves up a mannered karmic fable about stumbling upon a dead cat; novelist Shawn Wong reflects on his Chinese American heritage and envisages a tolerant multicultural society. Although the Shreves seem to have meant technological progress, the writers delivered much more personal definitions of what progress is. With such a broad, amorphous subject, it's perhaps inevitable that the result is a conversation with people talking largely to themselves. FYI: This is the Shreves' second book in a series of original essays on a single subject. The first, Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America, was published by Beacon in 1997.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
