An American Childhood

Rating:
Summary: Reflection and story telling come alive
Review: If you want to think about life and appreciate its nuances, then this is a book you will enjoy. If you're looking for a page turning, plot driven beach-read, this isn't for you. This book is so rich in vividness and thoughtfulness that I can't read a lot at one time. I read a chapter or two or three and then put it down and ruminate for a couple of days (while reading something a lighter). Sometimes the life in these pages seems more vivid than the one I am leading. Here is a girl discovering, with passion, what it is to be alive. And, here is a book that can remind you what that discovery felt like and put a bit of it back in your life.

Rating:
Summary: A Dramatic Comedy
Review: In our English class, we had to pick a book for an independent reading project. Our teacher gave us a list in which An American Childhood was one of the choices. We chose this book thinking it was going to be easy to read but not knowing how descriptive it was. We recommend An American Childhood for anyone who grew up in the 1950 time period. The author, Annie Dillard, uses descriptive words to help you get a sense of what her childhood was really like. The words that are used also make the book more understandable and more alive. She describes what it is like to grow up when a war is going on. For example, she explains how she had to go through bomb drills nearly every day. So if you are interested in reading a dramatic comedy and you grew up during the 1950's, then this book is definately for you. Even if you didn't grow up during that time, you should still read this book because you will learn more about life.

Rating:
Summary: A collage of unusual childhood pictures
Review: It took me three attempts to finally make it all the way through this book. The problem is not the vignettes, which are often amusing, but the fact that the book lacks cohesion. On the first page of the book, Dillard says, "the story begins". But she is wrong. This is not a story. This is a collage, a scrapbook of snapshots from her youth that lacks the unity of a good biography. Many readers of the book enjoyed this sort of format, but I found it prohibitive. Once I finally made it through to the end (on the third try), I enjoyed the experience, but it was a struggle early on in the book to keep going.

Rating:
Summary: A window into the world of childhood
Review: Not only is it enjoyable to witness someone elses childhood, but at the same time this book makes you discover your own. While sometimes this book seemd to drag on, the message Dilliard sends is a important one. Never forget how you grew up.

Rating:
Summary: Who knew Pittsburg could be so charming?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Too much description -- not enough dialogue, no plot.
Review: Our book club reviewed this book and about half liked it at all. The author does turn a beautiful phrase, and I would have liked more character development. I could write a book about my childhood, but somehow I don't think it would interest anyone either. Perhaps the author could write a delightful novel with less description and more action.

Rating:
Summary: It was a childhood memory and a future refernece for me!
Review: Since this was a required reading for Ramapo High I was forced to read this book. The first time I looked at the book I stood in awe. This was a long book for me ( well for the summer ) and I was totally discouraged. But as I started reading the book I realized that Dillard had so many experience like mine and had experinces that I wished to have but didn't. This is a wonderful book and I recommmend it to anyone young or old to read

Rating:
Summary: Like looking through someone's picture window at night
Review: The first time I read An American Childhood I was so thrilled I wanted everyone I knew to read it too. It is one of the handful of books that I will keep on the bookshelf by my bed for the rest of my life. (That shelf also includes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.)

An American Childhood was an eye opener for me and gave me pause to look back at my own childhood to see what I could see. I reread this periodically and enjoy the clarity with which Ms. Dillard writes about her memories of the start of life, the beginning of thought, the thrill of realizations when first made, and the excitement of knowing that life is ahead and it's up to the one who is living to get on with it. She sets up a scene and relates her feelings as she was living through it. A vivid memory for her is running with a friend through the backyards of her neighborhood chased by a man who was furious with them for thowing snowballs at his car. "It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you're doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive." She seems to have learned lessons early that it takes many of us several decades to internalize.

One day she ran down a busy sidewalk, arms flailing, pretending to herself she might just be able to take off into flight. "I was too aware to do this, and had done it anyway. What could touch me now? For what were the people on Penn Avenue to me, or what was I to myself, really, but a witness to any boldness I could muster..."

Her use of language is unexpected and sparkling and her ability to listen to how others sound, most notably her parents, allows you to be there in the room with them all, listening too. She is able to capture a person's look with a few careful words. "Father snapped his fingers and wandered, tall and loose-limbed, over the house." And the chapter on learning to tell jokes is perfect at showing the private life of a single family - not to mention, it's just plain hilarious! "Our parents would sooner have left us out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke. They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked...People who said, 'I can never remember jokes,' were like people who said, obliviously, 'I can never remember names,' or 'I don't bathe.'"

This book takes you to a specific place at a specific time, and also into the heart of childhood at any place or time. You read it and you can, for a while, throw off the sentimentalized vision of "youth" that you have drawn over the past, and instead remember how it actually was to grow up as a human being.

Rating:
Summary: There's a glory in the mundane.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Enchantment of the Real
Review: These are sketches of the author's early life, until age 16 or so, that achieve a unity more by the enrichment of themes than by a strict chronology.

[on boys] "... Their breathtaking lack of subtlety in every particular, we thought -- and then sometimes a gleam of consciousness in their eyes, as surprising as if you'd caught a complicit wink from a brick." (p90)

This is a fine book, to be read in a gulp (it's not long), or sipped over weeks, taking the chapters -- or very paragraphs -- as funny, fizzy little drinks of description or story. Her style is, in this book of urban reminiscence, still that of the nature writer, that intoxicating blend of the particular and general, close observation and little riffs on the meaning of it all.

Her milieu was of the working well-off; her father ran the successful family business and they lived in a Pittsburg that still was in the shadow of the Carnegies and Mellons. They had a housekeeper and a pretty, energetic mother. Annie and her sister attended dancing school and country-club functions, and collided with the boys in her "set", from whom she was expected to find her future husband. But she also played ball until it was too dark to see, and went compulsively to the woods to watch and to wonder. She collected rocks, and she read and read.

Annie Doakes was born the same year I was, but is both older than me, having lived at greater speed, and younger, having, I think, maintained more youthful enthusiasm. What is essential in this life story is its total focus on the years of childhood. Most biography skimps this, perhaps planting a few useful images of the wide-open ranchland, or the repressive parents, or the early bereavement that later can do explanatory duty. Each person is a mystery, of course, but I feel I know Annie Dillard, at least somewhat, after reading the adult describe the child. After all, we must believe that the child we were is where the adult we are came from.