An American Childhood
by Annie Dillard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Annie DillardEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 1988-09-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of An American Childhood
Book Review: A special command of words
Summary: 5 Stars
Annie Dillard writes of her childhood and there is nothing earth-shattering here. But that only underlines how wonderful is her command of the English language. It is not so much for her childhood that you read the book as the way she renders it on paper. You read a paragraph, then go back and read it again, just to savor the words and meaning. How can you fault a writer like this? She loves language and it shows on every page she writes. Read this and her other books.
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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