An American Childhood
by Annie Dillard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Annie DillardEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1988-07-20
ISBN: 0060915188
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780060915186
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of An American Childhood
Book Review: "It was a great town to grow up in, Pittsburgh" ...
Summary: 5 Stars
So says Annie Dillard, and having grown up there at almost exactly the same time, I would certainly agree. Her assertion preceded some reminisces about Carnegie Music Hall and the Van de Graaff generator, always a source of amazement for children. The book is replete with references and memories for a Pittsburgher of "a certain age," from the corporate buildings that once dominated the downtown area (and whose names have been transformed by the endless corporate mergers, all for "better efficiencies of scale" for sure, they will tell you), to the sparks from the wires above the trolley cars, to the fork ball pitcher for the Pirates, Elroy Face and the big snow of 1950. She struck a sentiment held by so many Pittsburghers, "Il faut travailler," it is necessary to work, "And no one who grew up in Pittsburgh could doubt that the great work was ongoing," from the steel mills, the air that was cleaned by Mayor Lawrence and others, to Doctor Jonas Salk, who ended the fear and reality of polio for all. But the book clearly transcends the specifics of the Pittsburgh locale, and the joys of the `50's.
"Draw the reader in" is one of those writer seminar's dictums, and for me Dillard did in spades, in the first paragraph: "When everything else has gone from my brain... the faces of my family- when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of the land as it lay this way and that." Was there something about the hills and dales of western Pennsylvania that produced people who felt that way? I read this book the first time in 1990, had the topography of Pittsburgh in my brain, but I was far more obsessed with the topography of a particular hill in Vietnam, an obsession like Cezanne with "Mont St. Victoire." I remember the shape, and the endless shades of green that would be reflected by the light throughout the day. Or so I thought. In 1994 I was able to confirm that yes, I had remembered the topography and green correctly, as Dillard had suggested, it would be the last to go.
Once drawn in, allow oneself to savor a book filled with insights into youth, and the coming of age. Consider: "Our parents and grandparents, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, there limp, course skin." Or, "Young children have no sense of wonder" (because everything is new and wonderful) or, "Ah, the boys. How little I understood them! How little I even glimpsed who they were... How completely I condescended to them when we were ten... and when we were fifteen, how little I understood them still, or again." There was also her developing interests in the natural world, from a moth, to more famously, stones, which would lead to her book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. And there is the embarrassing, humbling listing of her reading, including Rimbaud and Valery... this is in high school!
"I left Pittsburgh before I had a grain of sense," she proclaimed, in another assertion that found strong resonance and talked later about "achieving escape velocity," with implications that she really went wild... a story to the best of my knowledge she never has told, yet may be more fascinating still.
I was stunned by the dispersion in the ratings of this book at Amazon, a pattern that seems to fit "political" books, with extremes of agreement and disagreement. I looked at the 17 one star reviews; in virtually every case it was the only book they had ever reviewed. One sensed that this was a school assignment; an earnest teacher prodding her students, and they were as deaf as those proverbial stones. Alas, when I was in Pittsburgh, the world of books was still obtuse, and I might have done the same thing, but was saved by a quirky, obsessive, challenging English teacher in my senior year of high school who urged us all to begin "building a library."
And there are the prophetic, "Plus ca change..." aspects of her book; although she was talking about the events of the Great Depression, it would be the same thing again recently on Wall Street: "Because all the businessman realized at once, on the same morning, that paper money was only paper. What terrible fools. What did they think it was?"
In terms of recommendations, she once sent me her "favorite childhood memoir," Harry Crews' "A Childhood," and it was indeed excellent.
Finally, those hills and dales of Pittsburgh were (are) an excellent place to ride bikes, and build those calf muscles. She said that she "planned an especially sweeping tour for her hundredth birthday in 2045." (p 172) and isn't it wonderful to keep dreaming and aspiring, and I hope she'll publish a map of that tour so that I can duplicate it in 2046.
Summary of An American Childhood
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.
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."
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