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Amazon.com Review

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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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 and 60s.

Dedicated to her parents - from whom she learned a love of language and the importance of following your deepest passions - this narrative tale will resonate for everyone who has ever recalled with longing playing baseball on an endless summer afternoon, caring for a pristine rock collection, or knowing in your heart that a book was written just for you.

Review

"[An American Childhood] combines the child''s sense of wonder with the adult''s intelligence and is written in some of the finest prose that exists in contemporary America. It is a special sort of memoir that is entirely successful...This new book is [Annie Dillard''s] best, a joyous ode to her own happy childhood." -- Chicago Tribune

"A remarkable work...an exceptionally interesting account." -- New York Times

"A vivid and thoughtful evocation of particular personal experiences that have an exuberantly timeless appeal." -- Chicago Sun-Times

"An American Childhood does all this so consummately with Annie Dillard''s 50s childhood in Pittsburgh that it more than takes the reader''s breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you''re a different person, one who has virtually experiences another childhood." -- Chicago Tribune

"An American Childhood shimmers with the same rich detail, the same keen and often wry observations as her first book [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek]." -- Charlotte Observer

"By turns wry, provocative and sometimes breathtaking...This is a work marked by exquisite insight." -- Boston Globe

"Every paragraph Dillard writes is full of information, presenting the mundane with inventive freshness and offering exotic surprises as dessert...[Annie Dillard] is one of nature''s prize wonders herself--an example of sentient homo sapiens pushing the limits of the creative imagination. She deserves our close attentions." -- Chicago Tribune

"Loving and lyrical, nostalgic without being wistful, this is a book about the capacity for joy." -- Los Angeles Times

"The reader who can''t find something to whoop about is not alive. An American Childhood is perhaps the best American autobiography since Russell Baker''s Growing Up." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From The Washington Post

With the publication of An American Childhood in 1987, poet, essayist, naturalist, novelist and critic Annie Dillard helped usher in the age of memoirs. Following by only a few years the groundbreaking memoirs of Russell Baker (Growing Up, 1982) and Eudora Welty (One Writer''s Beginnings, 1984), Childhood, like these predecessors, defined a literary genre.

Annie Dillard blazed onto the scene exactly 30 years ago with the publication of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a meditation on the natural world that The Washington Post called "Walden with Pizzazz." Published when Dillard was just 29, and only a few months after her slim volume of poetry Tickets for a Prayer Wheel had landed with little notice, Pilgrim was stamped with the imprimatur of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction the following year. After the publication of four more books, she turned her attention to her own world in An American Childhood, a lyrical look at her idyllic and privileged childhood in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

Dillard captures the genius loci of at least a part of the city then and lovingly describes her unorthodox, caring parents. Her father, who not only helped make the classic cult movie "Night of the Living Dead" but read On the Road at least as many times as she did ("approximately a million"), "walked lightly, long-legged, like a soft-shoe hoofer barely in touch with the floor." Her mother, an "unstoppable force," always reminded her that she didn''t know everything yet and gave her "the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number." Along with the idea that Annie and her two sisters were "expected to take a stand," her mother also clearly passed on her love of language. One of Dillard''s hilarious retellings is of her mother overhearing the play-by-play of a Sunday afternoon baseball game and asking of the phrase "Terwilliger bunts one," "Is that English?" In summing up the compelling characters surrounding her, Dillard writes, "Everyone in the family was a dancing fool," making us all want that family.

In many ways this is less a coming-of-age story than it is a "coming-awake" one. This curious (double entendre intended) woman chronicles her own self-awareness. An intense, creative, acutely observant child with an outsized sense of wonder, Dillard dramatically, even breathlessly, writes of being 10 years old and increasingly aware of the world:

"The great outer world hove into view and began to fill with things that had apparently been there all along. . . . I woke at intervals until . . . I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again." Although she is writing at three decades'' remove, we readers feel the immediacy of this child''s time of "heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be."

For me, the book resonates especially in Dillard''s descriptions of her reading -- its importance, its content, its value as escape. Reading, for her, took on a life of its own. It became what W.D. Wetherell, in his review of this book for The Post, called her "most requited" love. She responded to the "dreamlike interior murmur of books" and "opened books like jars."

With good reason, An American Childhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a bestseller. It''s easy reading -- happy reading, even -- and, at least for me, it''s lively and whimsical, but serious enough so that it doesn''t creep over into the saccharine. I read this book as soon as it appeared, and this re-reading proved only a little less satisfying the second time around, perhaps because I''ve put more distance between me and my own childhood. Please join me with your questions and comments for an online discussion of An American Childhood on Thursday, Aug. 26, at 3 p.m. on washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
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