[.ca] An American Childhood (ISBN 0060915188)

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."

Who knew Pittsburg could be so charming?:
Only the luminous writing of someone as gifted as Annie Dillard could render the coal industry town of Pittsburg so charmingly. In this quintessentially American book, Dillard captures the pain of growing up. Born into family wealth, she led a privileged childhood among large homes, shady streets, very wealthy grandparents, private school - and a very close and loving family. It's easy to sense that Dillard's mother was the primary force in her childhood, a woman of formidable interests and energies, questing curiosity, and the determination that her 3 daughters would not grow up as nothing more than the narrow-minded results of too much money and pampering. Dillard was certainly brilliant as a young child, focused and single-minded in her interest-du-jour; that her parents provided her the wherewithal to indulge her fascination with art, nature, music, and writing turns out to have been a gift to us all. But Pittsburg? Yes, Annie Dillard makes it a place I just might look forward to visiting some day - and that, alone, is a testament to her powers.

There's a glory in the mundane.:
The furiously curious Annie Dillard! From her very earliest years she has a profound awareness of the mystery of life, nothing is without wonder, everything worthy of further scientific investigation. She HAS (she POSESSES) what Abraham Maslow called a "freshness of appreciation" meaning not only that nothing escapes her notice, but also that she tends to find some positive result out of all of her experiences. I find this to be an enviable trait. The book, her childhood, takes place in Pittsburgh in the 1950's. She is afforded much freedom and affluence in her somewhat eccentric and hilarious family (her mother didn't like the taste of stamps, so she didn't lick stamps; she licked the corner of the envelope instead). Dillard wonderfully paints a picture of a world that is charged with wonder, and gives us a sense that this electrified world is not just hers, but also the world of the reader. Her writing is best when describing her great love of nature. I could swear I HEARD the following sentence... "The waves disintegrated on the big beach; from the high cliff where our house stood, their breaking sounded like poured raw rice." It's true that one has to be patient with Dillard's disconnected vignettes... there are diversions that seem to bust up the chronology of events, but overall, the book is great in that it makes the reader feel that perhaps they too have never lived an insignificant day. She says: "...it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone's coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch - with an electric hiss and cry - this speckled mineral sphere, our present world." She seems to be saying that there is a glory in the mundane.

The Autobiographical Equivalent of "Seinfeld" ....:
. . . because it fills up space but is really about nothing in particular. Not nearly as funny as "Seinfeld." So "interior that I felt I was party to a psychotherapy session.

Terrible:
This book is possibly the worst piece of literature that I have ever read in my lifetime. I do realize that the book is an autobiography and is by no means meant to be an adventure fiction novel. However, if you are going to write about your life, please do something interesting. Nobody wants to hear about an average person leading an average life with no specific events to back it up. Dillard tries to make her life seem interesting by filling the book with useless descriptions and seemingly random transitions. I will keep this book by my bed simply because if I am having trouble sleeping, it will put me right out. Here is a quote to show exactly how disjointed the writing is. "I was hoping the streets would fill and I could shoot my cap gun at people instead of at mere sparrows. My project was to ride my swing all around, over the top. I bounced a ball against the house..."

An American Childhood:
If I have ever read a book that I truly, truly didn't like, this would have to be it. The book is filled with overbearing descriptions that have little to do with the actual book, and the author rambles on and on about points that just weren't interesting to me. Also, for me, when I read a book, I read it to escape reality, not to bury myself deeper in it, which this book did. I didn't find the plot of it very interesting. I was bored by the time she was ten years old--the characters seemed flat and she jumped from point to point without connecting them. It seemed like just a jumble of random ideas pasted into chapters in a book. Even my English teacher did not like this book, nor did any of my friends. I do not recommend this book.