Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9908 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-09
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
At the age of 22, Dave Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labour, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Generation-X way, naturally). In the early 1990s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting. All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park

Synopsis
Dave Egger's parents died from cancer within a month of each other when he was 21 and his brother, Christopher, was seven. They left the Chicago suburb where they had grown up and moved to San Francisco. This book tells the story of their life together.

Customer Reviews

Definitely a good read!
There aren't many books that warrant five stars, I believe, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is definitely one of them.

One of the reviewers here (amazon us) mentioned that one must be in his or her twenties to appreciate this book-- and, he added-- if one is over 30, he or she would dislike it. I have to disagree. As a woman in my late thirties, whose life couldn't be more different than Dave Eggers', I found this book to be excellent-- excruciatingly honest and a most poignant memoir.

One can't help but feel for what the Eggers family goes through. The reader cheers and cries from the sidelines. I was surprised at the vehemence of my emotions when reading this. Dave Eggers certainly drew me in to his and his family's life, and there were so many times that, as a parent, I wanted to find them all and parent them myself.

I would recommend this book, wholeheartedly, to everyone. People have compared Eggers to David Sedaris. As much as I enjoyed the one Sedaris book I read, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, I would put Eggers' book on another plane entirely. Sedaris' life is also interesting, but Dave Eggers is clearly a better writer and more honest with his emotions.

cant beleive i just discovered this...
I only bought this last month, after about a year of meaning to. I can't beleive it took me so long - a simply awesome book. it is everything you need in a book - poignancy (despite what Dave Eggers thinks), humour and drama.
Simply heartstopping.If you read one Eggers, make it this.

Way too cool for me
Maybe I'm just too old. Maybe I'm just not cool or hip enough. It has to be me, right? After all, this book was a book of the year according to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today among others. But I found it unreadable. Really. Sixty pages into this book and I wanted to just give up on it. Both of Eggers' parents died of cancer within a few months of each other and this is his memoir of their death and his raising of his younger brother. It actually starts off OK but fairly early in the book Eggers runs out of things to say. This probably could have been a good short story but at over 400 pages it just drags on and on endlessly.

Even the writing style is annoying as he writes these long, boring run on sentences that go on to discuss how he and his brother are the coolest people on the planet and how he can throw a Frisbee higher and farther than anyone which the San Francisco Chronicle thinks is the Zen of Frisbee but that I think it is just attempting to write stream of consciousness sort of like you are James Joyce but Joyce took years to write Ulysses and the paragraphs here read like they were written in an afternoon after a couple of beers while Oprah's playing in the background and you really wish that you were back in the car driving to the nude beach because hanging out with your brother is a lot more fun than writing a book even if you know that people are going to spend their money to read it but you did warn them in the preface so if they are bored beyond tears then too bad because they were warned and so they really have no right to complain about the dreary and pointless paragraphs about imagining that your brother is killed in some insanely tragic way like being run over by a van in slow motion or the uninspired complaints about neighbors or women at the little league games or any of the other dull, lackluster, pedestrian, spiritless, and unimaginative paragraphs that grace this tedious book.

Anyway, I am sure you are much cooler than I am so you will love this book so don't pay any attention to this review and go out and buy the book and be fascinated by stories of warehouses and starting magazines and excrement coming out of backed up toilets and meeting Bill Clinton and wanting to kill people because they don't treat you and your brother like the horrible tragic victims of the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone because God knows that no one has ever lost their parents before and that no one has suffered as much tragedy as you and your family so writing a memoir and whining for 400 pages makes perfect sense and this reviewer is just a big jerk who doesn't get it.