The Braindead Megaphone

In the title essay, the Megaphone Guy struts in, sets up his amplified bray, and his listeners find themselves unable to carry on their conversations, forced as they are to adopt his expressions, giving way to his domination, without realizing his sway. More relevant than ever ten years on, in an age of click bait and Buzzfeed and Facebook “likes” pestering us alongside pop-ups and pundits.Covering excess in Dubai, Saunders reflects amidst the predictable if dazzling glittery glitz how universal the Other remains, appealing by common human dignity and compassion to connect people no matter who or where. Under the snark, his essays at their best sustain the impact of his stories, where empathy mingles somehow with satire, and pop psychology send-ups deepen the poignant attempts of put-upon everyday people, corrupted by systems and co-opted by corporations, to maintain dignity against all capitalist odds. The profit motive reigns in Dubai; Saunders accepts in reporting for GQ his complicity, but he wonders what else he, gawking at Third World workers happy to toil in the desert, should or can do.As for the media he represents, on the border near Laredo, he gently mocks his Minutemen companions, as an East Coast journalist. Accused of not being a properly neutral reporter, Saunders fires back: “We’re being neutral.” “By not making fun of you.” (152) While insistent on his liberal bona fides, Saunders here allows himself to hear out the often caricatured other side of the issue, and the border. He never gives in, but following his coverage, he begins to become more patient, and we share the tolerance for insights transcending sound bites or partisan treatment of hot-button issuesBeneath a smart-ass tone, Saunders keeps aware of the need for honesty. He wonders if we may be wired by one of two nodes neutrally. Some protect what they have, and crouch and hunker down to guard it. Others pop up, eager to share, open to the new. Perhaps, he reflects, our politics thus emerge.This continues into an excellent introduction to Huck Finn. “Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies.” (203) Out of this conflict, Saunders maps the war within the American (and World) Psyche, ever contending. Apropos, he finds in Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme congenial fellow travelers.What links these writers is a refusal to give into the narrative's comforts, and to allow uneasiness. As Saunders finds investigating a report of a boy meditating for seven years: “A human being is someone who, having lived awhile, becomes terrified and, having become terrified, deeply craves an end to the fear.” Visiting a Nepalese Buddhist shrine, wary of miracles, he still muses: “all of this began when one man walked into the woods, sat down, and tried to end his fear by doing something purely internal: working on his mind.” (216). Saunders diagnoses this as a possible remedy for our “ambient fear” of knowing that when we love, we realize “there must someday come a parting.”While a few essays fall flat, feeling like sketches for stories better dramatized than satirized, and while his strength remains in fictionalizations of the predicaments he doodles in the lesser entries, overall this 2007 collection plays to the quirky elements that make his inventive tales so successful.

Beautiful. Enthralling. Read in one day (which is saying something for a slow-reading dullard like myself). Interesting, well-ordered mix of politically left-leaning essays, travelogues, and a masterclass on writing short stories. Saunders has an interesting voice and perspective on travels, focusing on the people, place, and society rather than the traveler himself. The tone is often self-depreciating yet always earnestly thoughtful and thought provoking. Just thoroughly enjoyable writing with engaging subject matters. George Saunders is both an incredibly creative mind and a writer with complete control of the language. Read everything he’s written; it’s well worth the time.A

George Saunders' short stories and fiction are arcanely smart and I always experience a "pleasure burst" of surprise when I roll out of his wildly inventive narrative and find I recognize the people on the station platform when i get back to civilization after all. His short stories and short novels can be astonishing at their inventiveness, but also his assured moral tone is deeply reassuring, and comes through the wire succinctly in the pages of this bookThese non fiction essays, and literary criticsms are written with such clarity, and having shed his usual vivid foliage, are compelling; unadorned and disarming in their simplicity and depth. Several of his big ideas: the liberal, silent majority of Americans and earthlings who are anti war by virtue of "their unwillingness to die for an abstraction", gives me a new way to frame pascifism, and his point that art and literature "does not provide answers, so much as they help us ask better questions", is not a new idea, but perhaps has not been said with such sincerity and humility. His calls for greater kindness and openmindedness are American ideas that we should be exporting to the world, and his stance that non judgemental living leads to greater happiness and satisfaction for all of us was thought provoking.

While not the humorous short stories I was expecting based on his previous work, this collection of essays is still laugh out loud funny, sad at times, thought provoking, and above all else so incredibly human and humane. A number of entries address the idea of The Other, implicitly or explicitly, and urge the reader to see them as nothing more than another human being just trying to get by, making a compelling case for empathy at all times. I cannot express how necessary this is, how hard it is to do, and how easy he makes it seem. Wonderful book, as usual from Saunders.

Perhaps the title work was chosen as such because of the title, but it is by far the weakest selection in this smattering of essays from a brilliant writer. Though his satire is a little more thin than his fiction, there is a clear Twain inspiration, which gets confirmed with Saunders's intro to an edition of Huck. While the travel pieces, about Minutemen and potential Buddhas, glow with his humanity, the most stellar pieces are of course about writing--Twain's narrative drive, Vonnegut's world perspective, Esther Forbes's sentences--are the most brilliant.

In the age of 24/7 "news," and particularly in the age of Trump, this analogy is powerful and challenging. Saunders question is, "How can we know what our own thoughts and opinions are with so much noise around us?" I once heard a very gifted preacher say, "I often find it very, very difficult to find 20 minutes worth sharing every week!" Now, imagine that you head a "News" network, and you have to fill every minute of every day with something meaningful. This is an impossible task. Saunders doesn't really answer the question, but he poses it in a way that is both clear and unforgettable.

Finds something he thinks is funny, then flogs it to death as if it will be funnier the more he labours the point. It's not. Two of our bookgroup of eight did like it though.

Great American writer. I think I prefer his fiction, but Saunders' arguments are clear and apt, and this book provides great insight into America ten years into the new millennium, and, especially the dominance of the kind of ramped-up media that has come to dominate the American landscape.

I love this writer! He makes me think and laugh and shake my head in wonder at his amazing ideas and skill. Anybody thinking about writing anything has to read "Thank you, Esther Forbes" and memorize it and apply it, and should be good to go. I would like to submit my membership to PRKA.

Not funny.