" Aptly titled. Despite its suspiciously large type size and obvious padding (e.g., interspersed excerpts from DFW's personal file of words he'd learned[*]), and though I'm certain Wallace wouldn't have had this published in this form had he lived, this wasn't a total corpse rape. About half of it can be fairly called juvenilia (at least by DFW's later standards, if not by others'), the sort of thing that I'm certain didn't get republished during Wallace's lifetime because he came to be embarrassed by it, including a couple of long-winded and cranky grad-school pieces about literary theory and a frustrating, sanctimonious essay about sex and love that makes a puritanical argument for AIDS as a cultural cleansing agent(!)(**). The other half, more or less, makes a strong argument for DFW as a great explainer of things, and a better case than "The Pale King" for the depth and significance of what we lost when he died. The two tennis articles alone (well, one is only tangentially about tennis as such) almost justify the purchase price - the one on Roger Federer isn't the best nonfiction piece he ever wrote, but it's pretty close - and I say this as someone who doesn't give a RAT'S ASS about tennis; the dictionary usage notes justify the rest of it and then some, and there are a couple of other excellent pieces as well (I was especially fond of the behind-the-curtain look at the essay-anthologizing process). Sure, this is hit-or-miss, but so are pretty much all of the other DFW books.
(*...which, if nothing else, will give most readers an occasional frisson of superiority at already having learned words that DFW, long after he became Kind of a Big Deal, had to teach himself ... and at catching the occasional outright error of definition. I found at least one, and no, I'm not going to say what it is.
**Argument with a ghost: I was surprised that DFW - even young, hormonally frustrated DFW - failed to see through the tired "free love" trope about the '60s/'70s counterculture, to get that it wasn't an all-consuming tsunami. Based on what I know of his biography, I would have expected him to intuitively grasp that sociosexual interaction is *always* going to be easier for certain types of people than it is for others, regardless of the situation, which makes the knights-and-dragons metaphor on which he bases the piece seem facile and fatuous. Sure, "love" got relatively "freer" during that period, but that just means the dragons got a *little* easier to kill; it doesn't mean there weren't any dragons. It was the kind of argument I'd expect from, say, Pat Buchanan.) "
— Evan, 1/17/2014