An American Childhood

Comment: The way in which the experience of childhood has been captured and related in this book is truly awe-inspiring.

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"!

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.

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.

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.