The One with The Braindead Megaphone

169. Title & Author: The Braindead Megaphone: Essays by George Saunders (257 pages)

Genre: Nonfiction—Essays

Completed: 11 December 2010

Summary & Review:

This volume contains a random assortment of self-important slop that the author calls “essays.”

A few years back I read an article by this writer about his trip to Dubai in a magazine. The article was hilarious and well written and just extremely entertaining, so much so that I wanted to read it again. I researched and eventually found out that that article was included in this book so I got the book and read it. First of all, the Dubai essay is still funny and well written and entertaining, but the rest of the book was so terrible that, as I was reading it, I told my wife, “This book has almost stolen my love of reading from me.”

This book was published in 2007 and you can tell by the whiny, childish, “Bush and Fox News are the devil” tone that permeates every single essay included within. Saunders mentions that he was supposedly once an “Ayn Rand-ish Republican,” and if that is true he has actively turned a blind eye to reality, or suffered some sort of terrible accident that left him slightly “braindead,” to use his word. I think what probably happened is that he left the real world and entered academia, where he remains, and therefore lost any need to actually come up with solutions when he could just theorize, pine for utopia, and whine about how terribly unfair the world is. Whatever the case, I could hardly stomach these idealistic, nonsensical “essays.”

Rating: 0.5