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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN num: 9780061456435
ISBN number: 0061456438
Label: Harper
Manufacturer: Harper
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: August 01, 2008
Publishing house: Harper
Release Date: August 12, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 281479
Studio: Harper
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Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken reveals all at once the enormous stature of Mendelsohn's achievement and demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigour and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games.
His interpretations of our most talked-about films—from the work of Pedro Almodóvar to Brokeback Mountain, from United 93 and World Trade Center to 300, Marie Antoinette, and The Hours—have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from The Producers to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, from The Lovely Bones to the works of Harold Pinter. Together these thirty brilliant and engaging essays passionately articulate the themes that have made Daniel Mendelsohn a crucial voice in today's cultural conversation: the aesthetic and indeed political dangers of imposing contemporary attitudes on the great classics; the ruinous effect of sentimentality on the national consciousness in the post-9/11 world; the vital importance of the great literature of the past for a meaningful life in the present.
How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is, and no one practices the vanishing art of popular criticism with more acuity, humor, and feeling.
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Rated by buyers 
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Interesting & informative essays on a number of subjects, many of them reprinted from New York Review of Books. Mendelsohn writes well, has a keen eye for detail, and informs and entertains as he appraises. Recommended.
Rated by buyers 
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Readers of the New York Review of Books will be familiar with the writings of Daniel Mendelsohn, who has written dozens of reviews of literature, movies and theatre. How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken pulls together many of those reviews, covering everything from movies like "Kill Bill" and "The 300" to Broadway plays such as "The Glass Menagerie" and "The Producers" to books like "The Hours," "Middlesex" and new academic books on history.
Why would anyone want to read a book of old reviews? Well, Mendelsohn is perhaps the best example of how this form can be used as a launching pad for examining large subjects like war and its culpabilities, sex and homosexuality, and human nature. That Mendelsohn does all of this by invoking a lens of the great classicists - Euripides, Homer, Sophocles - is a feat of a great and pointed intelligence.
These are not just reviews, though they are that too. Mendelsohn is a critic, and a stringent and demanding one. Swayed by the opinions of neither the public nor other critics, he deftly, and with great care, strikes at the heart of faults of many books, plays and movies. Despite this, these reviews are not rants, nor are they petty or arrogant. Their power comes from the combination of Mendelsohn's intelligence with his great love of writing, movies and theatre. It is only with the greatest respect that he points out the failings, of both the works of art themselves, and of our culture.
You might expect essays that invoke Sophicles and Homer to be difficult. Another great talent of Mendelsohn is his ability to write of these classic subjects in a very conversational manner - to, in fact, draw in readers who are not familiar with the classics the way he is, to serve as a bridge between the great ideas of history and the popular culture of today.
As I read his essays, I found myself simultaneously intrigued, entertained, and educated - and interested in going back to read, and see, some of these books and movies again.
Armchair Interviews says: An educational and fascinating read.
Rated by buyers -
While Mendelsohn has a gift for critical understanding of a work, I'd say he has an even greater gift for conveying that understanding in a relevant manner to his audience.
People (often times rightfully) attack critics often for being "haters" but, as Mendelsohn demonstrates so well here, good criticism is really about a careful consideration and love.
By treating a work seriously on its terms, setting it in cultural context, and questioning its greater implications, one is not dragging down an individual work but treating a work with the dignity it deserves and honoring the intelligence of its audience and the nuances in the history of the work's medium. To do all that with clear yet conversationally-engaging language is what this book offers many times over. From Brokeback Mountain to Almodovar to Olive Stone and Alice Sebold's bestseller The Lovely Bones... Mendelsohn sees what we are too mired in ourselves to view objectively.
Now, if I could only get him to consider the cultural relevance of my book (also available on amazon.com) On Toilets. One day! :)
Rated by buyers -
What a great book! I read it as compulsively as any whodunit while painlessly expanding my understanding of a wide range of artistic endeavors. I came away far better versed in the classics and with an expanded capacity to read, view and listen critically (in the best sense). I recommend this as a college text!
Rated by buyers -
Mendelsohn, Daniel. "How Beautiful It Is and How It Can Easily It Can Be Broken", Harper 2008.
Critical Essays
Amos Lassen
Daniel Mendelsohn very first caught my attention with "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity" in which brought together his personal history, culture, classics and explored who he is. Looking at his own homosexuality and Jewishness, he examined the conflicts within most of us. His subsequent book, "The Lost" even amazed me more with his own personal take on the Holocaust. In "How Beautiful It Is", Mendelsohn gives us a collection of critical essays and they are stunning. Mendelsohn is a man who knows how to write with intelligence and wonderful originality as well as with a quick wit. The book covers a myriad of topics from stage and screen and video games to the nature of war. Mendelsohn starts off in the introduction by explaining what a critic is and what a critic does and he explains how the book is organized and why. There are five sections: "Heroines", "Heroics", "Closets", "Theater" and "War". Reading the reviews presented here gives the reader new ideas to think about and we can easily see how Mendelsohn became regarded as such an influential man of letters.
Thirty essays comprise the book and Mendelsohn fears nothing and no one. I loved the essay on "Brokeback Mountain" and in it, Mendelsohn, we learn so much about the gay experience but it is really unfair to pick one essay over others as each is a gem and has something important to say.
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