This book will take you back to Burning Man but it's the DVD that I want to rave about. Watch it over and over. Beautifully done. A wonderful effort. Thanks to Holly and thanks to Bam Bam!

Based on the images of Holly Kreuter, Drama In The Desert: The Sights And Sounds Of Burning Man is a book and DVD set collecting full-color visuals and personal memories drawn from the harsh desert of Black Rock City, Nevada. Capturing the sometimes quizzical, sometimes cruel, sometimes dramatic art and documentary efforts of seventy contributors, Drama In The Desert is strongly recommended as an eclectic, unique, and vibrant experience impressing its fiery artistic message upon the reader's spirit.

I bought your book for my son's 22nd birthday. He loved the book so much that I bought myself a copy. Last weekend I watched the DVD and was amazed at how beautiful the photography and music is. I went to Burning Man for the past two years and the experience has completely changed my life. I get inspired by the creativity of all the beautiful people that work so hard to make it the greatest art show in the world. I decided to share my experiences with my relatives this Christmas by sending them all Drama in the Desert as presents, so I ordered another six copies. Thank you for everything. You are an amazing group of artists.

I enjoyed most of the work in this compilation. I sort of wonder what the heck it was compiled for, but I I'm glad it was, since I would never have come across any of this stuff otherwise. Favorites include Rodney Rotham's hilarious "My Fake Job" and "The Nice New Radicals" by Seth Mnookin, a piece which I might argue SHOULD be required for some people. Eric Schlosser's "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good" was fascinating, but I seem to be the only person on the planet who hasn't already read his work. Many pieces discuss certain cultural struggles: good pieces, but why so many? One piece is "graphic" in both meanings of the word. I am glad it is included, if only to act as a precedent for other compilations. The only notably awful work is "Hubcap Diamondstar Halo" which is as difficult as its title. And even though most of the pieces were engaging, few of them have remained with me. Maybe you should get this book if you like magazines, but not enough to actually subscribe to them. Maybe you should get it if you have a short attention span, like me. Or maybe you shouldn't get it. Don't worry, it's not required.

"Hubcap Diamondstar Halo" is a lyric from a T Rex song, Marc Bolan's biggest hit (well until he drove into that tree in his mini). Oh, great collection, by the way. Damn, you Americans, it used to be that only us Brits could do this sort of stuff!

The Best American NonRequired reading is a compilation of short stories drawn from a variety of magazines and small presses such as The Onion, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker. The topics range from humor (such as Rodney Rothman's "My fake Job" where he pretends to be an employee of an internet company and manages to blend in by using an empty desk and having his friends make fake business calls to his phone) to serious journalism (such as Michael Finkel's "Naji's Taliban Phase" the story of a Taliban soldier's defect to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan after 9/11). It even includes a graphic piece ("Bomb Scare" by Adrian Tomine).

Over all it is a great book, all the stories are well written and interesting. It will have you cracking up at one moment and then gasping in disbelief in another.

Eggers' first work of novel-length fiction is disappointing given the zealous reactions I've witnessed in people whom I've asked about "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Mr. Eggers' prose is at times nothing short of annoying. I don't feel like I need an exclamation point at the end of a sentence to understand emphasis, and when he uses them with such frequency I feel like either I'm being patronized or Eggers' is being lazy (the emphasis should be contained within the prose, not the punctuation). "But we had to move on." is a sentence so full of melodrama I had to stop reading the book for a minute to try and understand why it wasn't just tacked on to the last sentence, as the sentiment would have been conveyed much more succinctly. I do find the concept to be very intriguing (which is why I bought the book in the first place), however, it's execution is so heavy-handed that again I don't feel like Eggers' has enough confidence in either his own writing or the reader (see any of Will's conversations with his mother in which she explicates his purpose and Will responds "That's the point." The reader should know what the point is without your main character stating it at several different junctures, Mr. Eggers.). His dialogue, on the otherhand is mostly unforgivable. Capturing the idiosyncrasies of your generations manner of speech is dull, familiar, and uninventive. Much like the men in the Budweiser commercial who say with absurd stateliness "How are you doing?", this dialogue is a parody of itself. This is not the worst book I have ever read, it merely has too many repeated small mistakes (many of which I actually left out, believe it or not) for me to consider it a highly readable novel. By the end of it, I was just glad I had seen my last exclamation point and I could put it away.

I was thrilled to hear that Dave Eggers was finally publishing the follow-up to AHBWOSG. The end result (his first novel) is interesting, but not entirely successful. The novel features the travels of Will and his best friend, Hand. Will and Hand lost their other best friend, Jack, six months earlier, and their lives have been forever changed. Will also came into $80,000 pretty much be accident; unbeknownest to him, his picture was featured in an ad. Will clearly feels guilty that he has this money and that he's still alive while Jack is not. His "solution" is to plan an around-the-world trip with Hand to give away money to worthy people.

It sounds interesting, but the plot quickly settles into a series of somewhat repetitive vignettes. They arrive in a new country and have great plans. Their plans are thwarted and they end up wasting time in the country. It's kind of a cross between TV's "Amazing Race" and a travelogue. What saves this book is the sometimes thrilling ideas with which Eggers imbues his writing (e.g., the Jumping people, the librarian in his head). Overall, a worthy read, and one that will likely leave you wondering what thrills Eggers will provide us with next time.

Dave Eggers is captivating, funny, heartbreaking and down right brilliant. No one writes like him. He's the Jack Kerouac of the day. Adventurous, exciting - I wanted more!

Do not buy this book if you are not the kind of reader who can stomach "experimental English". This book is challenging in the kind of way that "Ulysses" is challenging - at times it can be a tough read, trying to follow what is going on.

There is a lot of self-indulgence on the part of the author in this book. Some reviewers have pointed this out but have excused this behaviour on the basis that Eggers is clearly aware when he is being so. I could never make up my mind whether Eggers was being annoying. I can't work out whether this book has been written with Eggers' tounge firmly in his cheek - I think so, but the fact that the subject matter and the humour in this book is at its heart the harrowing death of his parent and the aftermath makes for (at times) uncomfortable reading.

The book is, however, extremely wonderful in many respects. The best parts are without question the sections of the book where Eggers relays memories of the time with Toph, with his mother and his poignant trip back to Chicago. Eggers was always amusing when describing his fears about the babysitters!

In an ad for Vintage books the plot of "AHWOSG" was written as this: ..."a young man's account of raising his 8-year-old brother after their parents died just weeks apart."

I only wish that that was true. While Eggers does go into great detail about raising his brother, Toph, after his parents die there is much more to the book. Unfortunately, it's a lot of self-centered angst and humorous descriptions about the start and ultimate demise of "Might" magazine. While this is interesting and often entertaining, it is at times rambling and just plain boring. But maybe I sound too harsh...I mean, I did give the book four stars...and here's why...

Eggers in an incredibly entertaining writer. He is masterful at taking an ordinary, every-day, uneventful situation and make it colorful and amusing. The book follows no particular chronology, and at times I found myself flipping back several pages to see if I missed an important detail only to read it 30 pages later. This was annoying at first but after I caught on it didn't bother me...I actually liked the slow revelations. My main complaint was I wanted to read more about him and Toph. I LOVED the stories about their adventures together. They were heartwarming and beautifully written. Dave Eggers seems like an excellent "guardian/brother". I wish my dad could have been more like him.

He's in his twenties and he has a true story to tell. It's a sad story. And yet sometimes it's incredibly funny. It's a unique worldview of his generation and also of his particular life. First published in 2000, there's a 35-page preface to understanding the book. And later, a 48-page addendum which includes some deleted scenes, some details about how true events were somewhat fictionalized, and an update on the author's life. I read it all. But mainly, it's the 437-page book itself that I found fascinating.

Jump inside a young man's mind as his mother lies suffering in the advanced stages of cancer on the living room couch. Experience the excruciating details of her condition. Feel the many emotions as he and his older his sister Beth care for their mother. Beth has taken off a year from law school. Dave has taken off from college. Just five weeks before their father has died, also of cancer. It's been hard on the family for quite a while. Their older brother is off in the big world of career. Their little brother Christopher, whose nickname is Toph, is about 9 or 10 and is in the basement watching television.

After their mother dies, Dave becomes his little brother's surrogate parent. But Dave is only 22 at the time and acts like a kid himself. They move to California where they play a lot of Frisbee and live in a rental apartment that is always a mess. Their household might be unconventional, but there's no lack of love and Dave is obsessed with trying to keep everything as normal as possible for his brother.

With a few friends, Dave founds a magazine that's supposed to speak for his generation. And much of the book is about this group of friends who try to make a statement about things like consumerism and politics and disaffected youth. There are tragedies among his friends as well as lots of revisiting the details of his parents' deaths. Words spill from this young writer like an open faucet. It's like running a race at a breakneck speed and trying to read it all at once. The writer just picked me up and included me in his world. There I was, racing along with him, totally involved in the details of his life and all his thought processes while somehow living inside his brain for a little while.

I couldn't put the book down. And can't quite define its hold on me. I'm not surprised that it has gripped other people too and made a success. Certainly it's not for everyone. But I loved it. Recommended.

A few of these stories were memorable, but last year's edition was better and so is Houghton Mifflin's "Best American Short Stories 2002," which shares three of the stories. Don't worry that one of the judges edits the periodical that published the winning story -- it was one of the few intense stories in this book. Most of the stories are just character and setting studies by authors who added notes like, "I wrote the beginning, and then I didn't know where to go with the story." Apparently, the judges like to read about different people and places, but I don't. I like memorable stories that aren't filled with description, like the best works of O. Henry, which were not character sketches. Irony, still common in short fiction, is almost absent from this anthology.

I've picked up the last few years worth of the Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and usually I'm not disappointed, but this year I was. I've read most of volumes Dark has edited, and usually I agree with him on most if not all the stories, but I found this year's selection to be different. There are some good stories in the volume, but most of the stories are mediocre, dull, or just plain bad. But one bad volume doesn't spoil it for me. I still eagerly wait for next year's selection.

According to the editor of PRIZE STORIES 2002: THE O. HENRY AWARDS, thousands of short stories from hundreds of magazines were painstakingly reviewed in an effort to compile an anthology of the year's best in stort story fiction. This year twenty stories made the list while three of them were voted the best by the jurors Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates and Colson Whitehead. I personally do not agree with the juror's selection of the top short stories, which is a clear indication of how subjectivity is involved in the process of judging literature. What is enjoyable to one person certainly might not be for another. I've been reading this analogy periodically during the past couple of weeks and I finished with mixed feeling. Some stories intrigued me while others were downright uncaptivating. In addition, a couple were so utterly strange that they could be episodes of the twilight zone!

Out of this collection my favorite short story was A.M. Homes' "Do Not Disturb", which is a tale of a husband trying his best to emotionally deal with his bitter terminally ill wife as their marriage falls apart. I also enjoyed Anthony Doerr's "The Hunter's Wife" about how a husband deals with the supernatural powers of his wife in Montana. The reason why I didn't give this book five stars is because I believe that there are more losers than winners in this collection. But don't just take my word for it. Remember that the appreciation of literature is subjective. You just may love it!

Beautiful photography and interesting text, but I was interested in the actual art as painted by the elephants, but there is very little of that. Mostly pictures of jungles. If you like that you will like the book. If you want to see the acutual artwork you will be very dissapointed.