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An American Childhood

Harper Perennial Product Details
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Sales Rank: 122366
Harper Perennial
Released: 1988-09-01

Avg. Customer Review: 3.5 Star
Media: Paperback (1)
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An American Childhood
  • ISBN13: 9780060915186
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Product Review
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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Product Details
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: 3.5 Star based on 74 reviews
  • Sales Rank in Books: #122366

Customer Reviews
Avg. Customer Review: 3.5 Star

Customer Rating: 3 Star
Summary: This book is a conceit, I think.... 2010-08-26
Comment: I read a lot of memoirs, a lot of childood memoirs, a lot of childhood memoirs written by women. A lot of the books I read are written by so-called intellectuals, as this book is. I have had this book for probably 20 years, at one point owning 2 paperback copies which I located among my hundreds of books upon returning from a bookstore where I bought a remaindered copy of this book. For some reason I never read it. But last week I saw it again in a bookstore and decided to read it. Whew, this is exhausting, just remembering all of this. But the book was also exhausting, to the point that I could only skim the last two-thirds.

I think this book is what some refer to as a conceit, and it was too much for me ... I was very disappointed, as I think I saved this book as a dessert, thinking it might be the last good memoir I would read, maybe for a long while. But no, I need another one, possibly one written by an Australian as they seem to live life as it comes and without a lot of, well, conceit.
Customer Rating: 5 Star
Summary: Inspiring story of an artist's dawning consciousness 2010-08-08
Comment: All of Annie Dillard's work makes me want to be more awake. The inspiring aspect of An American Childhood is that we see her awaken, her unique sensibility form, and her genius dawn in an eccentric, loving family.

This is a gorgeous book--and a funny one too. A classic American memoir. An American Childhood showed me just how good a writer Annie Dillard is.

NOTE TO TEACHERS:

Based on their pathetic, angry one-star reviews, stop assigning this book to students. It's about childhood but it isn't for most children. Kids need a narrative that's more strongly event-based. Asking them to grasp this book's message is like expecting minnows to notice the beauty and properties of water.
Customer Rating: 4 Star
Summary: Pretty good 2010-07-31
Comment: Some of the pages are bent and it smells funny but for $1.82 it's pretty great.
Customer Rating: 5 Star
Summary: Best capture of childhood 2010-03-02
Comment: The way in which the experience of childhood has been captured and related in this book is truly awe-inspiring.
Customer Rating: 1 Star
Summary: I do not consider it a book at all. 2010-02-21
Comment: No, it is not a book. Nor is it a story. It is a sleeping pill in print form. I fail to see how anyone could bear to read this, let alone how the writer herself could live without guilt knowing that she released such a crime upon humanity into the world. In the passage that I recall from the last instance I was forced to read this was dry, pointless, boring and overall the worst bit of writing that anyone should ever have to sit through. The entire portion that I remember can be summed up in a few simple words. "I threw a snowball at a car. The man inside the car got out and chased me. He caught up with me and called me a stupid kid. THE END"
This is, quite literally, the entire contents of this portion. What took the writer over 6 pages to say could've been condensed into three sentences.
This sleeping medication has nothing to bring to the table, so I ask, no, beg of you not to purchase this travesty, and if you are the teacher of an English class or some other class which assigns books, please do not assign this one to your students. If you are forced to under the supposed "Excellent and approved curriculum", please protest against it. Help us to free humankind from these shackles and chains known as "An American Childhood"!