The Best American Essays 2006

&quot;The essays in this volume are powerful, plainspoken meditations on birthing, dying, and all the business in between,&quot; writes Lauren Slater in her introduction to the 2006 edition. &quot;They reflect the best of what we, as a singular species, have to offer, which is reflection in a context of kindness. The essays tell hard-won tales wrestled sometimes from great pain.&quot;<br><br>The twenty powerful essays in this volume are culled from periodicals ranging from The Sun to The New Yorker, from Crab Orchard Review to Vanity Fair. In &quot;Missing Bellow,&quot; Scott Turow reflects on the death of an author he never met, but one who &quot;overpowered me in a way no other writer had.&quot; Adam Gopnik confronts a different kind of death, that of his five-year-old daughter's pet fish -- a demise that churns up nothing less than &quot;the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchock's Vertigo.&quot;<br><br>A pet is center stage as well in Susan Orlean's witty and compassionate saga of a successful hunt for a stolen border collie. Poe Ballantine chronicles a raw-nerved pilgrimage in search of salvation, solace, and a pretty brunette, and Laurie Abraham, in &quot;Kinsey and Me,&quot; journeys after the man who dared to plumb the mysteries of human desire. Marjorie Williams gives a harrowing yet luminous account of her life with cancer, and Michele Morano muses on the grammar of the subjunctive mood while proving that &quot;in language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two.&quot;