Fadiman is on my short list of very favorite writers.  From her National Book Critics Circle award winning book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” published in 1997 to her three prior essay collections, she epitomizes for me what defines a great essay writer—-the sense that you would love to sit down over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and spend hours talking to this fascinating woman.  And can she ever write!

This book, her first essay collection in 19 years (she edited the “Best American Essay” volume in 2003 as well), comprises seven essays on widely diverse topics. She has had a deep interest in polar exploration since childhood, and one essay focues on the ill-fated expedition to the South Pole by  the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. My hero, Ernest Shackleton makes a cameo appearance as the editor of the ship’s weekly newspaper, The South Polar Times.

An ill-advised decision to buy a tadpole via the mail led to a 17 year stay for an African crawling frog named Bunky. Another essay dealt with the complexities of pronouns in today’s world and Fadiman’s efforts to get comfortable with the syntactically challenged ‘they’ when it refers to a singular person.  There is a very funny essay about her first printer , but the remaining three essays turn serious dealing with the impact of COVID on teaching a creative writing course, the impact on a sonbof having a famous and accomplished father, in this case, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  and the death of one of her students in an auto accident.   Each of the essays is tight and informative,and where appropriate,  funny and delightful.

The foreward for the book is written by Sam Anderson,  a staff writer for the NYT Magazine and he is just as smitten with Fadiman’s writing as I.  In what he calls, “An Extremely Partial List of Things I Love ABout the Essays of Anne Fadiman, he lists these six elements:  her lists; her titles; her flagrant literariness; her calculations; her quotations, and her similes. It’s a great intro and I totally agree with his take.

Fadiman, now 72 years old, lives with her husband, the author George Colt (“The Big House” and “The Game”, the former a wonderful tale of a family house on the Cape and the latter a fun replay of Harvard’s famous 29-29 victory over Yale in 1968) in a small hill town in Western Massachusetts and commutes to Yale where she is a Professor and Writer in Residence.   Her father was the famous polymath, Clifton Fadiman.

One hopes that this will not be Fadiman’s final volume of essays. She’s a treasure.