If you're like me, odds are you perked up at the idea of this book. In 2005 David Foster Wallace gave a brilliant commencement speech about life, education, and basically how to deal with graduation. It's one of those wonderful speeches that you could have fifty people listen to and gain fifty slightly different interpretations from. I was rather hoping that this book would contain at least one such interpretation, but no- this is solely DFW's speech. For some this will be somewhat of a disappointment, but not overly so. There's still merit in having a hard copy of this that isn't one of the various PDFs floating around out there. 
 What really puts a big damper on this book is that in order to puff it out to a full 137 pages, they chopped the speech up and put bits and pieces on each page. By this I mean that it isn't the typical "paragraph paragraph, page break, paragraph, etc" layout that you'd expect. You can have only 1-2 sentences per page on multiple pages. Once in a while this does help give an extra bit of emphasis to some lines, such as "This is water. This is water." lines at the end. For the most part, however, this is just irritating and occasionally can draw you out of the speech rather than keep you reading without any gaps or hesitations. Part of the speech's visual impact on papre is having most of it together and this causes the speech to loose some of it's oomph. 
 This really has to be one of the worst gift book adaptations of something that I've seen in a while, and trust me- I've seen quite a few in my day. If you're getting this because you really want a print version, then this will suffice although I would say there are better options. If this is something you're getting for a graduate, friend, or whatnot, it'd probably be better to just give them a printed copy of the speech or as one reviewer mentioned, buy it in one of the anthologies that contains it. This speech is wonderful but this layout does it a huge disservice and I don't think the layout should be given a freebie because of its content- especially when it diminishes it as a result