An American Childhood
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 inAn American Childhoodmerely 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."