An American Childhood
by Annie Dillard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Annie DillardEdition: Paperback
Published: 1988-09-01
ISBN: 0060915188
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of An American Childhood
Book Review: A Change of Heart
Summary: 4 Stars
I'll be honest; I absolutely *hated* this book when I first read it (for a class, the summer after 7th grade). As many of the other reviewers have mentioned, it is indeed a collection of vignettes about the author's childhood that don't flow into one another. However, the descriptions are beautiful, really giving a feel of living in the city (as opposed to the suburbs) of Pittsburgh. I probably would have only dealt this three stars had I not just spent four years of my life at college in Pittsburgh--this book captures the city's character superbly, something most reviewers probably don't relate to, but I can safely say:
Annie Dillard does a fantastic job of sketching the wonder of a precocious child that most of us cannot appreciate until we are well out of our childhood years ourselves. If you don't like this book now, pick it up in ten years, you might have a change of heart.
Summary of An American Childhood
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."A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.
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