A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers | Biographies & Memoirs |
ISBN: 0330484559 Global Overview for this book
Registered by bandaids of Southampton, Hampshire United Kingdom on 5/28/2005
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by bandaids from Southampton, Hampshire United Kingdom on Saturday, May 28, 2005
This book truly lives up to the title. It is an amazing and inspiring story. I'd like to see a review do it justice, but I haven't. I don't even think the synopsis can tell enough.

I also have this in my Permanent Collection.

Synopsis
Dave Egger's parents died from cancer within a month of each other when he was 21 and his brother, Christopher, was seven. They left the Chicago suburb where they had grown up and moved to San Francisco. This book tells the story of their life together

Amazon.co.uk Review
At the age of 22, Dave Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labour, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Generation-X way, naturally). In the early 1990s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting. All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park

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Released 18 yrs ago (6/10/2005 UTC) at Shakespeare's Head, Carnaby St in Soho, Greater London United Kingdom

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I'll try to leave this somewhere in the main bit of the pub, perhaps at the left end of the bar?

Journal Entry 3 by Del-Boy from Mooroolbark, Victoria Australia on Saturday, August 27, 2005
Found it in a pub in Central London. Still to read...

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