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    <name><![CDATA[Mark]]></name>
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  <id type="integer">12528</id>
  <isbn>0060915188</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780060915186</isbn13>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">177</text_reviews_count>
  <title>
    <![CDATA[An American Childhood]]>
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  <average_rating>3.98</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>1371</ratings_count>
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    <![CDATA[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 &quot;didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a  yellowish ridge.&quot; 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.  &quot;Everywhere, things snagged me,&quot; she writes. &quot;The visible world  turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.&quot;  From her parents she inherited a love of language--her mother's speech was &quot;an  endlessly interesting, swerving path&quot;--and the understanding that &quot;you do  what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself,&quot; not for anyone else's  approval or desire. And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in  <em>An American Childhood</em> merely youthful; &quot;still I break up through the skin  of awareness a thousand times a day,&quot; she writes, &quot;as dolphins burst through  seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.&quot;]]>
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    <author>
    <id>5209</id>
        <name><![CDATA[Annie Dillard]]></name>
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    <average_rating>4.00</average_rating>
    <ratings_count>11565</ratings_count>
    <text_reviews_count>1904</text_reviews_count>
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  </authors>  <published>1987</published>
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    <rating>5</rating>
  <votes>1</votes>
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  <read_at>Mon Oct 06 00:00:00 -0700 2008</read_at>
  <date_added>Tue Sep 16 15:49:25 -0700 2008</date_added>
  <date_updated>Mon Oct 06 17:17:57 -0700 2008</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[A keenly and humorously observed account of growing up (or waking up).  The book is as quotable as a transcendentalist work, but as full of wonder as any blessed childhood. Confused adolescence tangles with the &quot;thought that joy was a childish condition that had forever departed,&quot; but the ...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/33035108">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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