Annie Dillard achieves a clarity and crispness of recollection in this autobiographical thought-storm that I would have thought impossible.

The book starts and nearly ends with a memory from when she was ten years old of her father deciding to sail along a network of rivers from Pittsburgh, his home to New Orleans, where the music calls to him. Growing up in the 50s and 60s in Pittsburgh among an upper class that sounds to me like the essence of the old WASP culture, Dillard was captivated by her father's strange rebellion against the norm.

The CEO/church-attender/charity-board-member life that apparently typified the goals of the city's well-heeled men and received the sideline-admiration of its upper-class women constantly fascinates, confuses and repels Dillard throughout her childhood. Her inklings of a world outside it, symbolized by her father's strange transgression from proper Pittsburgh living, are a frequent theme, though not the only. She also spends a good deal of time recalling how she thought of herself and the world around her and the many subtle ways events which at once awakened certain forms of consciousness and stifled others.

She does a crafty job of weaving these threads -- the self-in-relation-to-its environment thread and the self-in-relation-to-self thread -- in such a way that no matter how detailed she gets I never felt any boredom nor impatience.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wonders if there's some intellectual moment in their childhood that they may have forgotten. If this book doesn't help you remember it, nothing will.