Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95049 in Books
• Published on: 1988-09-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .47 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Amazon.com
Annie Dillard remembers. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on. She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another--from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. "Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes. "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language--her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"--and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire. And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful; "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive."

From Publishers Weekly
Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard's mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity. The events of childhood often loom larger than life; the magic of Dillard's writing is that she sets down typical childhood happenings with their original immediacy and force.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Dillard's account of her childhood until her entrance into Hollins College is delightful, fast-paced, and full of action. Written in three parts, with a prologue about her father's brief sea venture when she was eight and an epilogue about her own children, the book reads like a play: there is excellent character development, and the vivid descriptions make the reader almost a witness to the events. Dillard fans will especially appreciate the insight she offers into her early consciousness and development, while others will enjoy this picture of growing up in the 1950s or simply the humor and sensitivity of the writing. Highly recommended. Carolyn M. Craft, English, Philosophy & Modern Languages Dept., Longwood Coll., Farmville, Va.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.