An American Childhood

Rating:
Summary: A magical account of childhood.
Review: This book is a magical, vigorous, and insightful account of one girl's coming to consciousness. A very special, joy-filled book. Every time I read it, I am delighted all over again. It instills in me a wonder at the possibilities of sheer attention. Super!

Rating:
Summary: Terrible
Review: 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..."

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Detailed Memories of One's Life
Review: This book wonderfully captures life through the eyes of a child and all the thrills and tumbles it involves. The great detail used will hook any reader who can appreciate great writing. Every step you take with Dillard is exciting. Her unique writing style leaves not a boring page and leaves the reader feeling as though he/she is living through the words of Dillard. I recommend this book to any reader who has a taste for exceptional writing.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Detailed Memories of One's Life
Review: This book wonderfully captures life through the eyes of a child and all the thrills and tumbles it involves. The great detail used will hook any reader who can appreciate great writing. Every step you take with Dillard is exciting. Her unique writing style leaves not a boring page and leaves the reader feeling as though he/she is living through the words of Dillard. I recommend this book to any reader who has a taste for exceptional writing.

Rating:
Summary: Dillard rambles on and on about the painfully mundane.
Review: This collection of literary snapshots from Dillard's childhood is made up of short passages that spotlight and explain her inner life, as well as the curious activities in which she engaged as a child. The book is filled with glorified, painstaking explanations and descriptions of the mundane. At times, it became difficult to trudge through certain parts of the book. Forced to read at least fifteen pages dedicated to rocks and minerals, I felt like a fifth grader studying a never-ending earth science assignment. Although some of her vignettes were interesting and insightful, too many were unnecessary and boringly specific.

Rating:
Summary: Prose that feels like poetry
Review: This has to be one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. I read it for the first time 9 years ago and still remember the shivers I felt...I still have images in my head of a young girl ice skating on the street under a streetlight. I called my mother to read passages aloud to her...I had to share it with someone! Please read this book, you won't be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: Nice book
Review: This is one of the best books that I have read in recent times.

Rating:
Summary: READS LIKE A WORK OF ART
Review: This is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. I first read it about ten years ago, and did not like it. I think it takes a certain amount of maturity to understand the discovery, the examined life, and the coming into "consciousness" that Dillard writes of. It should not be required reading for high school students, who may find it dull and boring; too full of one's "interior" life, as many who wrote reviews here did. My advice to them: please read it again when you are in your late twenties or early thirties...and see how easily the book puts you under its magical spell with its reminiscences of childhood.

Rating:
Summary: Insight into the author of Pilgrim of Tinker Creek ... but
Review: This provides insight into the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Holy the First. There are a lot of just fun stories; from a father that boats down the Ohio River to joke telling in the family. Growing up in Pittsburgh, she has a sense of place, a perhaps distorted history that all children have, of the Carnegies and Mellons, of steel and the Allegheny River. Throughout these threads, is the expansion of the interior life. There is also a discovery of her own intelligence, and her declaration as "Intelligensia". At times this is overdone in the book, seemingly ingenuine, a projection of her adult intelligence onto her own life as a girl.

Rating:
Summary: An exquisite, hilarious, reverent book! I love it!
Review: Though I have too little time for reading, I found this book so compelling I took baths instead of showers in the morning to have extra time to read, picked it up again when I got home, and as Annie describes herself doing, finished it and went straight back to the beginning to begin again. The second time was no less fresh, no less delightful, no less hilarious. I bought a copy and sent it to my brother. How did she do it? How did she remember in such painfully, exquisitely accurate detail what it was like -- what the emotions of every moment of childhood and adolescence were like, and what the obsessions were at each age? Possibly because I share her Pittsburgh childhood (though two decades later) and many of her passions (reading, drawing, science, nature, observation of detail) I felt I'd found a kindred spirit. Somehow, Annie managed make the most mundane events interesting, with a combination of wry humor and reverence. Obviously she learned something from the family joke-telling drills -- her delivery was beautiful. And her descriptions. There's something in common here with Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion -- both Dillard and Keillor seem to have begun adulthood as sharp critics of their social situations, yet when they moved away they found, despite some hypocrisies, something also loving and nurturing and solid about their places and people of origin.