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annepw's review against another edition
4.0
It's funny that I read this so soon after Michael Chabon's "Manhood for Amateurs," as the pair are preoccupied by many of the same themes and, of course, deeply tied to Pittsburgh. I also adore them both.
Superficially, my childhood was rather like Dillard's, insofar as we both grew up in comfortable middle-class white suburbs of Pittsburgh, and so I deeply appreciate the perspective she gives of the city in the 1950's. "An American Childhood" is one of the few memoirs ("Manhood" is another) that I have actually found worthwhile. While I think Dillard sentimentalizes the process of growing up, she is such a stylistic wizard that I would follow her to the ends of the earth.
Superficially, my childhood was rather like Dillard's, insofar as we both grew up in comfortable middle-class white suburbs of Pittsburgh, and so I deeply appreciate the perspective she gives of the city in the 1950's. "An American Childhood" is one of the few memoirs ("Manhood" is another) that I have actually found worthwhile. While I think Dillard sentimentalizes the process of growing up, she is such a stylistic wizard that I would follow her to the ends of the earth.
ris_stitches's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting enough life story, lovely prose, a bit too stream of consciousness for me. The book jumps around so much and often times you get so bogged down in detailed tangential stories that you forget where the heck she was in her tale.
hexagong's review against another edition
5.0
Courageously beautiful, honest, transporting, poetic. This is the most alive book I have read in a while. I think I could read anything Dillard writes as her prose is poetic, funny, vibrating with the aliveness like a beat poet, a passion for the natural world like a Thoreau, but more enjoyable and passionate.
nmcclallen's review against another edition
5.0
So. I can't decide if I'm falling in love with Annie Dillard, Annie Dillard's mother, or the way Annie Dillard writes about her mother. Slay me.
kristinerisch's review against another edition
5.0
I had to read this book over the summer to prepare for my AP Language and Composition class, I was reluctant to read it, and put it off until I absolutely had to read it, as many students do. When I read this book, I was blown away. Annie Dillard writes about a very ordinary childhood, and she makes it extrodinary. Her sentence flow with great care, creating a moving piece. She brings back the magic we had in our hearts when we were young. This book moved something in me. Dillard has a very special touch and this book was superb. I would absolutely reccomend this to lovers of literature and those who love a good book. It was beyond my expectations and I cannot say enough good things about it.
trekbicycles's review against another edition
5.0
Reading this book is like getting to live a second childhood! Dillard *gets* it -- the wonder and curiosity of youth, the angst of transitions, the spirit of adventure. A joy from beginning to end!
There are so many gems I want to hold onto forever, so I'm going to capture some of my favorite moments here:
"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are hold hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way... Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slid up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after." (11)
"He explained that the passage of time had buried the dime; soil tends to pile up around things. In Rome, he went on -- looking out the kitchen window as I leaned against a counter looking up at him -- in Rome, he had seen old doorways two or three stories underground. Where children had once tumbled directly outside from their doors, now visitors had to climb two flights of stairs to meet the light of the street. I stopped listening for a minute. I imagined that if the Roman children had, by awful chance, sat still in their doorways long enough, sat dreaming and forgetting to move, they, too, would have been buried in dirt, up to their chins, over their heads! -- only by then, of course, they would be very old. Which was, in fact -- the picture swept over me -- precisely what happened to all those Roman children, whether they sat still or not." (40)
"Walking was my project before reading. The text I read was teh town; the book I made up was a map... From my parents; earliest injunctions I felt that my life depended on keeping it all straight -- remembering where on earth I lived, that is, in relation to where I had walked... On darkening evenings, I came home exultant, secretive, often from some exotic leafy curb a mile beyond what I had known at lunch, where I had peered up at the street sign, hugging the cold pole, and fixed the intersection in my mind. What joy, what relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door! -- joy and relief because, from the very trackless waste, I had located home, family, and the dinner table once again." (44)
"But how could the gory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory?" (48)
"I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain until I died. I am awake now forever, I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present. My hands were icy from holding Kidnapped up; I always read lying down. I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers." (56)
"There was a joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn." (107)
"Parents have no idea what the children are up to in their bedrooms: They are reading the same paragraphs over and over in a stupor of violent bloodshed." (120)
"I wanted to notice everything, as Holmes had, and remember it all, as no one had before. Noticing and remembering were the route to Scotland Yard, where I intended to find my niche. They were also, more urgently, the route to the corner yard on Edgerton Avenue, to life in the house we had left and lost." (130)
"The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open... I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was as it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear -- she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones -- maybe only the stones -- understood." (139)
"What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where maples grow straight and their leaves lean down. For a joke you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years." (150)
"I opened books like jars. Here between my hands, here between some book's front and back covers, whose corners poked dents in my palm, was another map to the neighborhood I had explored all my life, and fancied I knew, a map depicting hitherto invisible landmarks." (165)
"As a life's work, I would remember everything -- everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher's funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga's sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and ever scrap of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly's infancy if not me? (Unaccountably, I thought that only I had noticed -- not Moly, but time itself. No one else, at least, seemed bugged by it. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives." (173)
"What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized." (183)
"When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path, a fast path into a long tunnel like those many turnpike tunnels near Pittsburgh... I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was. I was growing and thinning, as if pulled. I was getting angry, as if pushed. I morally disapproved most things in North America, and blamed my innocent parents for them. My feelings deepened and lingered. The swift moods of early childhood -- each formed by and suited to its occasion -- vanished. Now feelings lasted so long they left stains. They arose from nowhere, like winds or waves, and battered at me or engulfed me." (222)
"I read some few books with such reverence I didn't close them at the finish, but only moved the pile of pages back to the start, without breathing, and began again. I read one such book, an enormous novel, six times that way -- closing the binding between sessions, but not between readings." (223)
"When I wasn't playing this crashing overture, I played boogie-woogie, or something else, anything else, in octaves -- otherwise, it wasn't loud enough. My fingers were so strong I could do push-ups with them. I played one piece with my fists. I banged on a steel stringed guitar till I bled, and once on a particularly piercing rock-and-roll downbeat I broke straight through one of my Father's snare drums." (223)
"I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I must transmogrify into vapor. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules in thin air. No possible way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: maybe if he swung me by the legs and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much on his eyelids; outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain?" (223)
"Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson was a thinker, full time, as Pasteur and Salk were full-time biologists." (238)
"I was approaching escape velocity. What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: What would you read? I drove up and down the boulevards, up and down the highways, around Frick Park fast, over the flung bridges and up into the springtime hills. My boyfriend and I played lightning chess, ten games an hour. We drove up the Allegheny River into New York and back, and up the Monongahela River into West Virginia and back. In my room I shuffled cards. I wrote poems about the sea. I wrote poems imitating the psalms. I held my pen on the red paper label of the modern jazz record on the turntable, played that side past midnight over and over, and let the pen draw a circle hours thick. In New Orleans -- if you could get to New Orleans -- could the music be loud enough?" (255)
There are so many gems I want to hold onto forever, so I'm going to capture some of my favorite moments here:
"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are hold hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way... Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slid up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after." (11)
"He explained that the passage of time had buried the dime; soil tends to pile up around things. In Rome, he went on -- looking out the kitchen window as I leaned against a counter looking up at him -- in Rome, he had seen old doorways two or three stories underground. Where children had once tumbled directly outside from their doors, now visitors had to climb two flights of stairs to meet the light of the street. I stopped listening for a minute. I imagined that if the Roman children had, by awful chance, sat still in their doorways long enough, sat dreaming and forgetting to move, they, too, would have been buried in dirt, up to their chins, over their heads! -- only by then, of course, they would be very old. Which was, in fact -- the picture swept over me -- precisely what happened to all those Roman children, whether they sat still or not." (40)
"Walking was my project before reading. The text I read was teh town; the book I made up was a map... From my parents; earliest injunctions I felt that my life depended on keeping it all straight -- remembering where on earth I lived, that is, in relation to where I had walked... On darkening evenings, I came home exultant, secretive, often from some exotic leafy curb a mile beyond what I had known at lunch, where I had peered up at the street sign, hugging the cold pole, and fixed the intersection in my mind. What joy, what relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door! -- joy and relief because, from the very trackless waste, I had located home, family, and the dinner table once again." (44)
"But how could the gory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory?" (48)
"I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain until I died. I am awake now forever, I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present. My hands were icy from holding Kidnapped up; I always read lying down. I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers." (56)
"There was a joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn." (107)
"Parents have no idea what the children are up to in their bedrooms: They are reading the same paragraphs over and over in a stupor of violent bloodshed." (120)
"I wanted to notice everything, as Holmes had, and remember it all, as no one had before. Noticing and remembering were the route to Scotland Yard, where I intended to find my niche. They were also, more urgently, the route to the corner yard on Edgerton Avenue, to life in the house we had left and lost." (130)
"The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open... I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was as it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear -- she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones -- maybe only the stones -- understood." (139)
"What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where maples grow straight and their leaves lean down. For a joke you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years." (150)
"I opened books like jars. Here between my hands, here between some book's front and back covers, whose corners poked dents in my palm, was another map to the neighborhood I had explored all my life, and fancied I knew, a map depicting hitherto invisible landmarks." (165)
"As a life's work, I would remember everything -- everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher's funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga's sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and ever scrap of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly's infancy if not me? (Unaccountably, I thought that only I had noticed -- not Moly, but time itself. No one else, at least, seemed bugged by it. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives." (173)
"What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized." (183)
"When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path, a fast path into a long tunnel like those many turnpike tunnels near Pittsburgh... I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was. I was growing and thinning, as if pulled. I was getting angry, as if pushed. I morally disapproved most things in North America, and blamed my innocent parents for them. My feelings deepened and lingered. The swift moods of early childhood -- each formed by and suited to its occasion -- vanished. Now feelings lasted so long they left stains. They arose from nowhere, like winds or waves, and battered at me or engulfed me." (222)
"I read some few books with such reverence I didn't close them at the finish, but only moved the pile of pages back to the start, without breathing, and began again. I read one such book, an enormous novel, six times that way -- closing the binding between sessions, but not between readings." (223)
"When I wasn't playing this crashing overture, I played boogie-woogie, or something else, anything else, in octaves -- otherwise, it wasn't loud enough. My fingers were so strong I could do push-ups with them. I played one piece with my fists. I banged on a steel stringed guitar till I bled, and once on a particularly piercing rock-and-roll downbeat I broke straight through one of my Father's snare drums." (223)
"I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I must transmogrify into vapor. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules in thin air. No possible way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: maybe if he swung me by the legs and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much on his eyelids; outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain?" (223)
"Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson was a thinker, full time, as Pasteur and Salk were full-time biologists." (238)
"I was approaching escape velocity. What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: What would you read? I drove up and down the boulevards, up and down the highways, around Frick Park fast, over the flung bridges and up into the springtime hills. My boyfriend and I played lightning chess, ten games an hour. We drove up the Allegheny River into New York and back, and up the Monongahela River into West Virginia and back. In my room I shuffled cards. I wrote poems about the sea. I wrote poems imitating the psalms. I held my pen on the red paper label of the modern jazz record on the turntable, played that side past midnight over and over, and let the pen draw a circle hours thick. In New Orleans -- if you could get to New Orleans -- could the music be loud enough?" (255)
melvankomen's review against another edition
4.0
Lovely, meandering prose. Generosity in detail and her desire to add meaning. There is no grand theme or moment (that I could find) just beautiful ruminations of what it is like to come awake in childhood and watch yourself slip further from your parents and more into yourself.
ccaedi's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Annie Dillard writes beautifully. The title of "An American Childhood" is a bitter pill to swallow, though. The book's reflections are alternatingly universal: "Living, you stand under a waterfall... Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest?... Yes, you could learn to live like this." and wild demonstrations of wealth and class, which depict only the narrowest version of an American Childhood - often only tangentially acknowledged as her own: "The same old Pittsburgh families ran this church... When they collected money, I noted, they were especially serene. Collecting money was, after all, what they did during the week... I knew these people, didn't I? I knew their world, which was, in some sense, my world too, since I could not, outside of books, name another."
Still, for the human breaths and the wisdom of a woman looking back on her youth with a clarity I am only starting to guess at, this book feels like a humble gift.
Still, for the human breaths and the wisdom of a woman looking back on her youth with a clarity I am only starting to guess at, this book feels like a humble gift.
darbystouffer's review against another edition
4.0
This book has had me thinking about nostalgia and my childhood all week. She reminds me of feelings that I had when I was her age, she writes like a lady, but a lady who doesn't take herself too seriously. As she grew up, I liked her less and less. Her thirst for knowledge led her to believe that she knew everything. I can very much relate to this, sadly. But looking back with retrospect on her childhood, she provides a beautiful story peppered with insights into not just a child's soul, but all of humankind.