this is sort of a mixed bag. the best according to dave eggers. i laughed out loud when i saw JT leroy in evidence. still, there are some good things in here. ( )

I loved:
-Ryan Boudinout's "The Littlest Hitler" (a little boy's Halloween experience)
-Lisa Gabriele's "The Guide to Being a Groupie"
-The Onion's "I'll try anything with a detached air of superiority"
-Amanda Holzer's "Love & Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape" (a list of songs in clever order)
-James Pinkerton's "How to Write Suspense" ( )

3.5 stars overall
Individual ratings:

Foreword - Dave Eggars 3
Introduction - Zadie Smith 4
The Guide to Being a Groupie - Lisa Gabriele 2
Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire - David Drury 4
The Pretenders - Chuck Klosterman 4
How To Write Suspense - James Pinkerton 3
Stuff - JT Leroy 4
Saint Chola - K. Kvashay-Bayle 4
I'll Try Anything With a Detached Air of Superiority - The Onion 3

A moderately interesting collection, but more of a mixed bag than I'd expect from anything claiming to be a 'best of' overview. The stand-out stories were the David Drury, JT Leroy and Kvashay-Bayle, respectively about the prejudices expressed against a family that doesn't fit in an exclusive community, a homeless girl findng unexpected artistic comfort and a young teenage Muslim girl coming to terms with her place in American society just before the Iraq war. Chuck Klosterman's reportage on the modern phenomenon of the tribute band was funny and insightful, and Zadie Smith intro was an excellent little essay on finding a balance between required and experimental reading, as well as finding one's voice as a writer.

Both the Onion piece and the James Pinkerton story were vaguely amusing but rather slapstick in their approach to satire while Lisa Gabriele's tale of a rebellious teenage girl read like a college creative writing exercise. Both this and 'Saint Chola' used a second person narration, but here it seemed somehow to distance rather than include the reader.

There was something oddly backward-looking about this collection on the whole; all the fiction or memoirs dealt with looking back to childhood or adolescence, while Klosterman's piece is partly about nostalgia and the Onion's oddly old fashioned - although possibly as it is a satire of those awful New Yorker articles that do actually read like that.

I also have the 2004 collection, so am interested to see how that compares. ( )

"Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" is amazing.

This one I was less impressed with. There are some excellent pieces: Sherman Alexie's on identity, Mark Bowden's profile of Saddam Hussein, Chuck Klosterman on a tribute band, and George Packer's on the discarded-clothing market come to mind. Many of the others didn't do much for me, but I'm still glad I read them to get the full range of the collection. ( )