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An American Childhood
Harper Perennial Product Details |
An American Childhood
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."
Product Description
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.
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An American Childhood
- Paperback: 272 pages (1988-07-20)
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1988-09-01
- Label: Harper Perennial
- Studio: Harper Perennial
- ISBN: 0060915188
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 69 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #60510
Avg. Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A special command of words 2009-12-17
Comment: 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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Assigned reading-- NOT 2009-09-06
Comment: I must start off this review of "An American Childhood" with a glance backward; when, as a teacher of 11th-grade American Literature classes during the 1960s and 1970s in a central Pennsylvania school, my late mother would assign "Walden" to her "upper level" Academic English section. A look at the reviews posted here, and the parallels are uncanny. A few (sensitive, inquisitive?) teenagers liked Thoreau. But most of them-- had they been asked-- would have given "Walden" the very same one-star reviews I see posted here at Amazon.com for Annie (Doak) Dillard. No changes necessary-- apart from the name of the book and author.
Like "Walden," this is a book that no teacher of English should blindly assign to a whole classroom of teenagers to read and report on. Using the Biblical analogy, it becomes a case of casting pearls before swine. Surely, it has to be posited that either a fair percentage of American readers have no "inner life" at all-- or that their conscious minds have been busy trying to suppress any relict memories of their once having had one. "An American Childhood" is not a novel, for goodness' sakes... and I seriously doubt that it was written in order to amuse, entertain, or fill in a boring couple of hours in the lives of those folks who dismiss without a second glance any and all questions about childhood, about curiosity, about what is meant by a "personality," or about why in the world we are all waltzing or drifting through life at a certain time and locale, in the first place.
On the other hand, if you do find yourself musing about such matters from time to time, here is a book after your own heart. To mention but one of its fine points, I have never come across a more accurate description anywhere, of precisely what it felt like (for some of us) to pass from childhood into adolescence. The child Annie Doak calls to mind another, earlier, Anne, Lucy Maud Montgomery's fictional Anne Shirley. May I presume that most of you readers have met red-haired Anne (with an "e") through the pages of a book or books? I feel confident that if you ever wished that you had had a "bosom friend" like Anne Shirley back in the days when you were young, you will be glad of the hour you first encountered Pittsburgh's Annie Doak... although their outward circumstances in life were quite a bit different.
One final note: surely by now this book can be found on most library shelves. Pick up a copy and read some pages in it at random. If you hear something saying to you that you need your own copy, to read at leisure, to put on your shelf at home... then by all means buy yourself one.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: "It was a great town to grow up in, Pittsburgh" ... 2009-06-12
Comment: So says Annie Dillard, and having grown up there at almost exactly the same time, I would certainly agree. Her assertion preceded some reminisces about Carnegie Music Hall and the Van de Graaff generator, always a source of amazement for children. The book is replete with references and memories for a Pittsburgher of "a certain age," from the corporate buildings that once dominated the downtown area (and whose names have been transformed by the endless corporate mergers, all for "better efficiencies of scale" for sure, they will tell you), to the sparks from the wires above the trolley cars, to the fork ball pitcher for the Pirates, Elroy Face and the big snow of 1950. She struck a sentiment held by so many Pittsburghers, "Il faut travailler," it is necessary to work, "And no one who grew up in Pittsburgh could doubt that the great work was ongoing," from the steel mills, the air that was cleaned by Mayor Lawrence and others, to Doctor Jonas Salk, who ended the fear and reality of polio for all. But the book clearly transcends the specifics of the Pittsburgh locale, and the joys of the `50's.
"Draw the reader in" is one of those writer seminar's dictums, and for me Dillard did in spades, in the first paragraph: "When everything else has gone from my brain... the faces of my family- when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of the land as it lay this way and that." Was there something about the hills and dales of western Pennsylvania that produced people who felt that way? I read this book the first time in 1990, had the topography of Pittsburgh in my brain, but I was far more obsessed with the topography of a particular hill in Vietnam, an obsession like Cezanne with "Mont St. Victoire." I remember the shape, and the endless shades of green that would be reflected by the light throughout the day. Or so I thought. In 1994 I was able to confirm that yes, I had remembered the topography and green correctly, as Dillard had suggested, it would be the last to go.
Once drawn in, allow oneself to savor a book filled with insights into youth, and the coming of age. Consider: "Our parents and grandparents, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, there limp, course skin." Or, "Young children have no sense of wonder" (because everything is new and wonderful) or, "Ah, the boys. How little I understood them! How little I even glimpsed who they were... How completely I condescended to them when we were ten... and when we were fifteen, how little I understood them still, or again." There was also her developing interests in the natural world, from a moth, to more famously, stones, which would lead to her book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. And there is the embarrassing, humbling listing of her reading, including Rimbaud and Valery... this is in high school!
"I left Pittsburgh before I had a grain of sense," she proclaimed, in another assertion that found strong resonance and talked later about "achieving escape velocity," with implications that she really went wild... a story to the best of my knowledge she never has told, yet may be more fascinating still.
I was stunned by the dispersion in the ratings of this book at Amazon, a pattern that seems to fit "political" books, with extremes of agreement and disagreement. I looked at the 17 one star reviews; in virtually every case it was the only book they had ever reviewed. One sensed that this was a school assignment; an earnest teacher prodding her students, and they were as deaf as those proverbial stones. Alas, when I was in Pittsburgh, the world of books was still obtuse, and I might have done the same thing, but was saved by a quirky, obsessive, challenging English teacher in my senior year of high school who urged us all to begin "building a library."
And there are the prophetic, "Plus ca change..." aspects of her book; although she was talking about the events of the Great Depression, it would be the same thing again recently on Wall Street: "Because all the businessman realized at once, on the same morning, that paper money was only paper. What terrible fools. What did they think it was?"
In terms of recommendations, she once sent me her "favorite childhood memoir," Harry Crews' "A Childhood," and it was indeed excellent.
Finally, those hills and dales of Pittsburgh were (are) an excellent place to ride bikes, and build those calf muscles. She said that she "planned an especially sweeping tour for her hundredth birthday in 2045." (p 172) and isn't it wonderful to keep dreaming and aspiring, and I hope she'll publish a map of that tour so that I can duplicate it in 2046.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: I have to admit, you have a point. 2009-06-04
Comment: I set out to review "An American Childhood" quite favorably, but unavoidably the large number of one-star reviews caught my attention. For readers who might not have time to read all the less than favorable reviews I have taken the liberty to excerpt from them. It is in no way my intent slight the original reviewers, so readers should imagine each sentence in separate quotes and by all means consult the originals for appropriate attribution:
"If I have ever read a book that I truly, truly didn't like, this would have to be it. Dillard was pretentious, tiring and, quite frankly, the most boring character I have ever encountered in my reading. The most selfish thing to do in the world is to write an autobiography when you had boring and average childhood.They are memories of the least bit interesting and sapid to the common human mind frame. I could write a book about my childhood, but somehow I don't think it would interest anyone either. If you are going to write about your life, please do something interesting. If you want to learn about an average childhood, just walk up to an average Joe, ask him about his history, and you have just read this book in five minutes.
Unless you are deserving of serious penance I would not recommend that you even touch this book. It is like walking in a dark tunnel, blind-folded, and praying that there is no oncoming-train heading your way. I could not put this book down because I wanted the nightmare to finish. During my sleep a demon came to me and shoved this book into my face. In the night, I woke up with a searing pain in my head that would not go away for hours and my vision has been slightly impaired since.
I guarantee reading a couple pages of this book is better than any sleeping pill. Just pick this one off the shelf and you will sleeping like a baby. Never before have I actually woken up the next morning with the book on my face. If you enjoy plot, story, dialogue, intrigue, and being awake long enough to read more than a few pages DONT buy this book. The only time it would be picked up is to be dusted off and placed back. Did they make a movie for this book? I can't stand to read it!!! Why aren't there Cliff Notes for it?? I am sorry Mrs. Dillard, but this book is normal, you are normal, so that is why you only have a normal average from amazon.com reviewers. I only wish Amazon let me give it zero stars."
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Enchanting...especially for a Pittsburgher 2008-11-20
Comment: Annie Dillard pulls you in right away, especially if you know and appreciate Pittsburgh: "When everything else has gone from my brain....I will see only those forested mountains and hills, and the way the rivers lie flat and moving among them...." Ms. Dillard experienced Pittsburgh as part of my own family did, although her generation is between mine and my parents. For others, this region is just the backdrop for a story of growing up with a keen awareness of how we fit and perform in the world and how time moves along. It could be anywhere. The story is fascinating because its ordinariness drives the fundamental insights Ms. Dillard provides as she "watches herself" growing up. For a city girl, she had a pretty adventurous childhood, with many intense interests along the way. Still, I read this book waiting for the next set of local references and experiences she describes so engagingly. She does indeed stop the book at the end of her childhood, as she's exiting her rebellious high-school years and preparing for college, and I was hoping for the rest of the story.
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