I just finished reading The Best American Essays 2006, edited by Lauren Slater, and I'm less than impressed. I usually really like these collections - some essays are always more enjoyed than others (it's all a matter of personal taste) but I look forward to the possibilities these collections present - you can find essays on literally anything in here and often there are several about things I would never think to write about. A few years ago I just started buying the new edition without even giving it a second thought - there's never been any doubt that I would find several pieces of value within it.

After this year I'll have to rethink that whole decision.

The problem is not the writing quality - the quality is up to its steller standard as usual. The thing is that this year the editor seems to be preoccupied with death in a major way - a weird way. Consider this: out of twenty essays in the book, twelve deal with death on some level. Here's how it breaks down:

Toi Derricotte - "Beginning Dialogues": dead mother
Eugene Goodheart - "Whistling in the Dark": aging and death
Adam Gopnik - "Death of a Fish": dead pet (which is his daughter's first experience with death)
Sam Pickering - "George": dead pet again (the typical gut wrenching dead dog story)
Kim Kupperman - "Relief": dead mother and brother (this one wins an award for opening in a city morgue)
Robert Polito - "Shame": mystery that will never be solved in wake of dead father and mother
David Rieff - "Illness as More Than Metaphor": dead mother (in this case Susan Sontag)
Oliver Sacks - "Recalled to Life": death of spouse causes woman to become depressed leading to stroke which leaves her permanently debilitated
Alan Shapiro - "Why Write?": death of friend (slow, painful death)
Lily Tuck - "Group Grief" - grief counseling for a whole group of folks who lost people to death
Scott Turow - "Missing Bellow": dead Saul Bellow
Marjorie Williams - "A Matter of Life and Death": author faces death (this would be the cancer essay)

I can't imagine that I'm the first reader to notice a serious theme here (and I should point out that there's another essay that deals with the near loss of a hand due to a dog attack - would that be "near death of limb"?) but I have no clue why anyone would decide that this is the way 2006 should be remembered. By the time I got to poor Marjorie Williams' essay at the end and realized what she was writing about I threw the book across the room. It was impossible to read at that point - I could not care anymore about any dead and dying people (or animals). And I was pretty ticked off by then anyway. I know death is part of life (believe me, I know), but does it have to be the predominant part of living? Does it have to be present in a piece for it to be considered serious writing? (Please let that not be true.)

Editor Lauren Slater comments in her introduction that "Many of the essays deal with loss, with death. This may in part reflect my own concerns as I journey around the sun for the forty-third time..." Wait a minute - I'm sorry - you're 43 and preoccupied with death? Really? For heaven's sake, why? And why inflict that preoccupation on the rest of us?

Slater continued in her intro that the death focus also reflect the aging baby boomers and the "story they [the essays] tell of what it is like to grow old, to grow sick, to die, health plan in hand." This revelation might very well explain something else I noticed about these pieces - all the death in this book is about the authors. It's about their parents, their friends, their pets, their patients or themselves (possibly). It's all about death that touches them directly. What you won't find here is anything about the still dying Gulf Coast and the failure of the US to save it, about the dying in Iraq or Afghanistan or Darfur, about the dying ice caps, dying endangered species or dying Bill of Rights. You won't read about any big issues, any large picture, any suggestion that the world is more than just one person's problems.

You won't find anything like this amazing piece on the murder of musician Dinerral Shavers recently in New Orleans.

I'm not saying that the suffering of any of the authors in Best American Essays 06 is insincere or should be ignored. I'm not saying they aren't allowed to mourn or rage or be grief stricken. But I don't understand why so many essays that read remarkably similar should be included in a "Best of" collection, when the greater losses all around us are ignored.

Adam Gopnik's daughter got over her dead fish in a day. Couldn't Lauren Slater spare New Orleans or Mississippi at least that much of her attention?