Who are the people responsible for these ungenerous ratings? What ingrates they must be! ( )

Obtained in a cache of free books, prepared to donate to my local hospital's patient library.

Then read two essays:
John Holt's "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading"
Erich Fromm's "The Nature of Symbolic Language"

Worth keeping for those alone, and once LT's Contained In relationship function is fully supported, should find other essays worth multiple readings.

I clearly misread the title to mean that this was a book of essays. To me an essay is a self-contained piece of non-fiction prose with a beginning, middle and end, intended to be the author's complete statement (at least for the time being) on the subject.

The works in this anthology (the 3rd edition, at least) are mostly excerpts from longer works. Clearly examples of expository writing, but not what I was looking for. Even as excerpts I found problems with them. The larger work to which they belong is only listed in an acknowledgement page in the front. The pages that were excerpted are not listed so you don't know what part of the book you are reading from.

Since I am interested in the form of the essay, this collection was useless for my purposes. ( )