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An American Childhood | 
 enlarge | Author: Annie Dillard
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $0.47
You Save: $13.53 (97%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 19182
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Perennial Library Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0060915188
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5409
EAN: 9780060915186
ASIN: 0060915188
Publication Date: September 1, 1988
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: ** Possible marking on cover. 100% Satisfaction guaranteed on all purchases.
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Amazon.com
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 59 more reviews...
 A Change of Heart May 20, 2008
I'll be honest; I absolutely *hated* this book when I first read it (for a class, the summer after 7th grade). As many of the other reviewers have mentioned, it is indeed a collection of vignettes about the author's childhood that don't flow into one another. However, the descriptions are beautiful, really giving a feel of living in the city (as opposed to the suburbs) of Pittsburgh. I probably would have only dealt this three stars had I not just spent four years of my life at college in Pittsburgh--this book captures the city's character superbly, something most reviewers probably don't relate to, but I can safely say:
Annie Dillard does a fantastic job of sketching the wonder of a precocious child that most of us cannot appreciate until we are well out of our childhood years ourselves. If you don't like this book now, pick it up in ten years, you might have a change of heart.
 Awakenings March 7, 2008
Suddenly this book hit me, what a prize it was, out of the blue. Who was expecting it? Like when you hear a song you will love forever. This is it. She has had many of the same fascinations I had--rock collecting, for example. And her words are just right, how it's like entering a cave, and a new world opens up, that was just invisible before, taken for granted. The whole book is about how she moves thru life that way. She does everything on a far grander scale than I ever did, her reading is omnivorous and extensive. I love the way she writes so economically about her feelings, and yet the way she says it is just right. I don't think I've ever read a book that describes inner thoughts like this before. I just discovered Annie Dillard as a writer.
 Lexicon January 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I don't relate at all to this "American Childhood." The author uses vocabulary that shows how many obtuse words she knows. This is not effective communication. I am well educated and would still have to look up many words which interrupts the flow of her story.
An American Childhood December 18, 2007
As a child who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa during the timeframe of the book. I was expecting something along the lines of "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash". Instead I got a self indulgent muse of a pampered life that did not embrace working class Pittsburgh of the 50's and 60's. A great let down.
 This Book Gave Me a New Experience August 26, 2007
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Never before have I actually woken up the next morning with the book on my face.
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