Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more with the negative posts. I think this brief, beautiful looking book is a wonderful tribute to David Foster Wallace's brilliant mind. This speech was spread throughout the internet, yes. But I, for one, think this is piece of writing is something worth collecting and pondering. And publishing it in a book form gives it the stature it deserves. That may sound old-fashioned, but even in the internet age, that's still the role of a book publisher. And I am happy to have this on my shelf to be able to hold onto it for years to come.

My initial reaction was the same as the other reviews, huge rip off. But what the editors have done changes for the better the experience of reading what I already thought was an amazing speech. Most of us read the speech on the internet , which because of the medium is always cursory. The book makes us slow down and reflect on the message, and it's not trite or trivial or obvious (except in the sense that any observation that is clearly true seems trite). It's ten bucks very well spent- I bought a bunch of copies for gifts.

Before buying this book I knew exactly what it was: David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon Commencement speech. I actually read the speech online before I had read any of his books (now I've read them all save for Everything and More). and was hoping they would publish, which they did, and I think they did a very good job. I've recommended the speech to some of my friends and now I'll be able to do one better and give it to them as a gift. It seems silly to give this book a 1 star. Rate on content, not on something unknowable like the motivation of the publishers.

I'm pretty sure DFW, wherever he is, must really be regretting leaving control of his estate to whatever moron decided it would be a good idea to publish his speech one-line-at-a-time, as if it were the next installment of "Chicken Soup for the Soul". The layout substantially alters (for the worse) the impact of the speech, treating each sentence as if it were intended to be a precious little nugget of wisdom, divorced from overall context of the speech as a whole. I guess it's predictable that his heirs would want to cash in, but it's pretty unforgivable that they so brutally mangled his work in the process. Also: I seriously doubt the title is DFW's. "This is Water" is confusingly misquoted and sort of renders the initial anecdote meaningless, and the sub head is rife with the sort of hubris that DFW argues against in the speech itself.) The version that appeared in Best NonRequired Reading 2006 (edited by his friend Dave Eggers, who presumably titled it according to DFW's wishes) was simply "Kenyon Commencement Address" If you want the speech in book form, buy that book at least instead of this three legged baby.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (The Best American Series) The actual speech is, by the way, brilliant and moving, which is what makes this edition all the more tragic. (5 *'s for the speech 1 * for the edition itself)

This is a horrible rendition of a wonderful speech. The layout misrepresents his words as aphorism-sized bites, and nothing could be further from the real piece. How can these sentences stand alone on a page?:

p 61

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

p 122

That is being taught how to think.

There are piles of these stand-alone sentences that should have never stood alone. But even reading it in order, first page to last, leaves the sense of the thing messed with terribly. The cadence is as college students reading poetry in their coffee-house meetings. Why format the book in the way it's formatted? For sense? To pre-chew the speech and let me know what to think about it by breaking it up into parts that make an editor's points, not the speechmaker's? It's formatted this way so that it is stretched out to almost 140 pages that can bring in >$10.

This isn't even getting into the censorship of his original speech.

This is a shameful recasting of a fantastic speech. Shameful. For shame!

The most terrible thing is that we see a hint that, in death perhaps as in life, the people who were close to DWF clearly don't get it.

Do not buy this.

I am a huge DFW fan. This is no "Infinite Jest" friends. I know you could put the entire book on one sheet of 8 inch paper typing paper. DFW would never stand for such a ripoff when alive. Don't give the crappo editors a penny on this scam. One page will have 3-4 short lines on it.

Sorry I've read the reviews that say "not a ripoff" but I'm afraid their arguments do not hold water. Belive me, its a classic ripoff. Heck don't buy it because its a waste of paper and resources if our attempts to protect you from getting screwwwwwwwwd fall on deaf ears.

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.

Please, please, don't buy this. The full text of this book is available for free online (at [...] and many other places as well), it's just a transcript of a commencement speech he gave in 2005, and this book stretches that brief text over 144 tiny pages by printing only one sentence per page. The speech is okay, not great. It certainly doesn't deserve shelf space with the brilliant books Foster Wallace published in his lifetime. There is no content other than that freely available transcript in this tiny book, other than some of the most preposterous and enraging promo copy I've ever read on the dust jacket (the callous post-suicide deification has begun hardcore!). I'm all for the posthumous publication of uncollected Foster Wallace material (can't wait for the Pale King!), but this is just ridiculous.

This speech (as well as a lot of other awesome stories, articles, essays, quotes, first-lines, jokes) is included in the 2006 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.

The point of packaging DFW's commencement address (freely available on the web, yes) is to serve as a graduation gift, not as a bogus DFW-oeuvre expander. Outraged that there's only one sentence per page? How many sentences do you think were in the graduation gift bestseller of 20 years ago, "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" by Dr Seuss? Granted, no pictures here to compell sub-literate, drug-addled, and sex-obsessed post-adolescents it's aimed at to turn the page, but still. . . A fine exploration, in compact form, of questions every adult leading Thoreau's life of quiet desperation should/needs to ask him/herself. And it's funny, compassionate, loving, and--knowing now what was to become of Wallace--fundamentally very serious. A beautiful work.