JULY 2014 - AudioFile
In 2013, award-winning writer George Saunders delivered a speech to graduates at Syracuse University, where he teaches creative writing. The speech went viral on the Internet in short order. Saunders’s message was to encourage the graduates to emphasize kindness in their lives. As he reminisces briefly about the regrets of his own life, he wistfully references incidents when he wishes he had shown greater kindness. As narrator, Saunders has a conversational tone that is intimate, self-effacing, and encouraging. He makes note that he has limited time and moves along at a brisk pace to make the most of it. Saunders delivers this positive message clearly and simply, with no diversions. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
03/03/2014
An expansion of a commencement speech passed around the web, this essay hits warm and tender notes without straying from safety zone of feel-good advice. In a tone by turns grandfatherly and fun-loving, renowned fiction writer Saunders (Tenth of December) identifies his main regrets in life as what he calls "failures of kindness." While his exploration of kindness initially promises to pull from science and history, it falls back on the maligning of certain self-focused beliefs already widely maligned: the belief that one is indispensable to yet distinct from the universe, and the idea that humans are eternal. Portraying common major life goals (raising children, succeeding in one's career) as part of a never-ending, accomplishment-based cycle, Saunders impugns the cycle for distracting individuals from the important questions, yet he does not adequately establish why pursuing these should hamper an investigation of the meaning of life. Nor does he address obvious counterpoints—that children constitute a personal value of parents and that their pride is therefore an expression of personal joy. As life advice, the speech contains standard contradictions: seek the life that is most fulfilling to you individually, yet follow pursuits that will ultimately diminish your sense of self. His wording is genteel and his examples vivid, but the overall impression is that of a standard-issue secular sermon on loving one another. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
As slender as a psalm, and as heavy.”—The New York Times
“The graduating college senior in your life probably just wants money. But if you want to impart some heartfelt, plainspoken wisdom in addition to a check, you can't do much better than [Congratulations, by the way].”—Entertainment Weekly
“The loving selflessness that [George Saunders] advises and the interconnectedness that he recognizes couldn’t be purer or simpler—or more challenging.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Warm and tender.”—Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
11/15/2013
Saunders has been on everyone's mind since the publication of Tenth of December, a much-praised New York Times best-selling story collection. This book expands on a convocation address he gave at Syracuse University, which has since drawn over one million page views on the New York Times website.
JULY 2014 - AudioFile
In 2013, award-winning writer George Saunders delivered a speech to graduates at Syracuse University, where he teaches creative writing. The speech went viral on the Internet in short order. Saunders’s message was to encourage the graduates to emphasize kindness in their lives. As he reminisces briefly about the regrets of his own life, he wistfully references incidents when he wishes he had shown greater kindness. As narrator, Saunders has a conversational tone that is intimate, self-effacing, and encouraging. He makes note that he has limited time and moves along at a brisk pace to make the most of it. Saunders delivers this positive message clearly and simply, with no diversions. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-02-06
Another example of an author who might well reach a wider audience through a graduation speech than through anything else he has written. Long revered among fans and fellow writers, Saunders saw his popular profile elevated through even greater attentions paid to (and accolades earned by) his most recent story collection, Tenth of December. In contrast to the playful postmodernism that often characterizes the work of the New Yorker writer and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, this meditation on kindness that he delivered in 2013 at Syracuse (where he teaches creative writing) is transparent in its message, which, he admits, is "a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder." His address took him eight minutes to deliver—it subsequently went viral, like that of a similar address by the late David Foster Wallace—and takes less time to read. But its self-deprecating tone is as pitch perfect as one would expect from Saunders, and the advice it imparts seems sincere and ultimately more helpful than the usual platitudes, as he explains how "most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving" and as they mature, perhaps become parents, begin to see how soul-deadening selfishness can be and how the struggles of ambition can put one on a seemingly endless cycle. There's plainly a spiritual underpinning here, as the author writes in favor of "establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition—recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us." The loving selflessness that he advises and the interconnectedness that he recognizes couldn't be purer or simpler—or more challenging. A slim volume appropriate as a graduation gift.
