The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less
Terry Ryan, 2002
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743273930


Summary 
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s.

Standing up to the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated ideas about women, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for innovation, all the while raising her six sons and four daughters with the belief that miracles are an everyday occurrence. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Evelyn Ryan's story is told by her daughter Terry with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit and sense of humor can triumph over adversity every time. (From the publisher.)

Prize Winner was adapted into a 2005 film with Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson.

Author Bio 
• Birth—July 14, 1946
• Where—Defiance, Ohio, USA
• Death—May 16, 2007
• Where—San Francisco, CA
• Education—B.A., Bowling Green State University (Ohio)

After a long bout with cancer, Terry Ryan died peacefully at home on May 16, 2007. She had been buoyed throughout her illness by notes and calls from readers who had just finished reading the book or watching the movie, and couldn't wait to tell her how much they enjoyed it. More than anything, Tuffy Ryan loved to hear people's comments about her prize-winning mother, Evelyn, whose sense of humor and indomitable spirit surfaced so often in Terry's own response to life. After the shock of hearing her diagnosis in November of 2004, for example, Tuff said pensively, "Well, my old life is over, and my new life is just beginning." This is a legacy her fans have the privilege of carrying on every day. (From the book's official website.)

More
Terry "Tuff" Ryan was originally from Defiance, Ohio, resided in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She was best known for her memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.

She was born to Leo (nicknamed Kelly) and Evelyn Ryan, and was the sixth of ten children. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was a memoir of her life and that of her family, especially her mother, a 1950s housewife with 10 children who provided for the family by winning contests. The book was released as a theatrical film in November 2005. It stars Julianne Moore as Evelyn Ryan and Woody Harrelson as Kelly Ryan. Terry Ryan was a consultant on the film.

Ryan was also the creator of the long running cartoon T.O. Sylvester in the San Francisco Chronicle. She was married to her long-time partner, Pat Holt, on St Valentine's Day 2004. Her account of her wedding, titled We Do! was published by Chronicle Books.

In 2004, when the movie The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was being filmed, Terry discovered that she had Stage IV brain cancer. On May 16, 2007, Terry died of cancer at her San Francisco, California home. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
This plucky middle American chronicle, starring an unsinkable, relentlessly resourceful mother and her Madison Avenue-style magic, succeeds on many levels—as a tale of family spirit triumphing over penury, as a history of mid-century American consumerism, and as a memoir about a woman who was both ahead of her time and unable to escape it.
The New Yorker

A good-natured memoir as compelling as a commercial jingle.
O, The Oprah Magazine

In the 1950s, the Ryan family struggled to make ends meet. Ten kids and a father who spent most of his paycheck on booze drained the family's meager finances. But mom Evelyn Ryan, a former journalist, found an ingenious way to bring in extra income: entering contests on the backs of cereal boxes and the like. The author, Evelyn's daughter, tells the entertaining story of her childhood and her mother's contest career with humor and affection. She is not a professional narrator, but her love and admiration for her mother come through in every sentence. Evelyn won supermarket shopping sprees that put much-needed food on the table, provided washing machines and other appliances the family couldn't afford, and delivered cash to pay the mounting pile of bills. This well-told, suspenseful tale is peppered with examples of Evelyn's winning poems and slogans, taken from the years of notebooks that she saved and passed on to her daughter, and has a fiction-worthy climax that will keep listeners laughing even as they're glued to Ryan's tale.
Publishers Weekly

Evelyn Ryan, wife of an alcoholic husband and mother of ten children, lived in a small town in a time and place when women did not seek "jobs." When finances ran low, feeling desperate, she turned to her parish priest who suggested she "take in laundry." Ryan had to laugh at the advice because she could barely keep up with her own family's washing and ironing. A lesser woman might have succumbed to poverty, but she was determined to keep her family financially afloat and to teach her children that the life of the mind was important. In the early 1950s, Ryan started entering contests, composing her jingles, poems, and essays at the ironing board. She won household appliances, bikes, watches, clocks, and, occasionally, cash. She won a freezer, and several weeks later, she won a supermarket shopping-spree. When the family was faced with eviction, she received a $5000 first place check from the regional Western Auto Store. Ryan's unconventionality and sense of humor triumphed over poverty, and her persistence makes the listener cheer her on. Read by the author, this story is delightful. Recommended for all public libraries. —Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Library Journal

(Adult/High School) While her sometimes abusive husband drank away a third of his weekly take-home pay, Evelyn Ryan kept her ever-growing family afloat by entering every contest she came across, beginning with Burma Shave roadside-sign jingles. In post-World War II America, money, appliances, food, excursions—anything you could think of-were routinely offered to the person who sent in the best jingle, essay, or poem, accompanied, of course, by the company's box-top or other product identification. Although she more often won prizes of products, such as a case of Almond Joy candy bars, Mrs. Ryan once won enough for a down payment on a house just as her family was being turned out of their two-bedroom rental house. That contest also won her a bicycle for her son. She entered so many contests, often several times under different forms of her name, that hardly a week went by without some prize being delivered by the postman. Charmingly written by one of her 10 children, this story is not only a chronicle of contesting, but also of her mother's irrepressible spirit. With a sense of humor that wouldn't quit, she found fun in whatever life sent her way, and passed that on to all her children who, despite the poverty they grew up in, lived and still live happy, useful lives. YAs who like family stories should love this winning account. —Sydney Hausrath, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
School Library Journal>

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio:

1. How would you describe Terry Ryan's mother Evelyn and the challenges she faced as wife, mother, and family breadwinner.

2. Could Evelyn survive, even triumph as she did, in today's world? Or is ours a different time with its own set of circumstances?

3. You might read and discuss this work in tandem with Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle: both books are memoirs about parenting and growing up in difficult circumstances.

4. Have some fun...set up a display of several personal or household items and devise clever prize-winning jingo entries for each, like Evelyn did. Not easy!

5. Watch the movie version, in part or full, and compare it to the book. How closely does the film follow the book, especially in its characters? Does Julianne Moore capture your idea of what Evelyn was like?

(From LitLovers. Please feel free to use these ideas/questions, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Escape
Carolyn Jessop (with Laura Palmer), 2007
Crown Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767927574


Summary
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.

When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.

Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.

Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—January 1, 1968
• Where—Hildale, Utah, USA
• Reared—Colorado City, Arizona
• Currently—West Jordan, Utah

Carolyn Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a group splintered from and renounced by the Mormon Church, and spent most of her life in Colorado City, Arizona, the main base of the FLDS.

Since leaving the group in 2003, she has lived in West Jordon, Utah, with her eight children. Laura Palmer is the author of Shrapnel in the Heart and collaborated on five other books, the most recent being To Catch a Predator with NBC's Chris Hansen. She lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews 
It must be said up front that her narrative is inconsistent at times and irritatingly vague. You never know, for instance, whether she thinks that her escape has ruined her chance for salvation, whether she even believes in God, or whether, indeed, she ever did. But the book is fascinating for all that, mainly because of its close attention to the details of her everyday life and how it seemed to her. She took each event as it came, until her existence became unbearable, untenable, and then she came up with the courage to radically change her life…it's hard to get a handle on other people's religions, or even that salvation we hear so much about. Where should tolerance be exercised and where should it stop? Escape doesn't presume to answer these questions. It just tells a fascinating story that would properly horrify us if it occurred in Arabia or Afghanistan, but right here in America, it's just baffling.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

(Audio version.) Seventeen years after being forced into a polygamous marriage, Jessop escaped from the cultlike Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints with her eight children. She recounts the horrid events that led her to break free from the oppressive world she knew and how she has managed to survive since escaping, despite threats and legal battles with her husband and the Church. Though sometimes her retelling overflows with colorful foreshadowing and commentary on how exceptional she is, the everyday details she reveals about this polygamous society are devastating and tragic. Frasier delivers Jessop's words in a soft voice that develops intriguingly from an innocent and naïve tone into a more assertive and self-confident one that mirrors Jessop's journey. She maintains the same rhythm, but through the inspired words of the text, she really embraces Jessop's persona.
Publishers Weekly

Born into the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the author describes her life before, during and after her marriage at 18 to a 50-year-old man with three other wives. This painful memoir certainly doesn't bear much resemblance to the polygamous fantasies of the HBO series Big Love. The author's large family lived in grinding poverty, and Jessop was constantly subjected to humiliations at the hands of her husband, Merril. But she had inner resources. In a decidedly patriarchal culture, she often spoke her mind, and she talked Merril into letting her go to college. Her occasional questioning of his views, however, earned his suspicion and the condescension and mistrust of her fellow wives. So what kept Jessop in the community? Fear. From her earliest childhood, when she played a game called "apocalypse," she had been taught that God punished those who disobeyed his rules. Furthermore, she knew that no woman had ever managed to get herself and her children safely away from the community. Still, one night in 2003, Jessop snuck her eight children out of the house and fled to Salt Lake City. There, she found little in the way of support networks for women escaping polygamy. She was told that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." The chapters about her struggles to adjust to this new life are more riveting than the occasionally tedious descriptions of her earlier hardships. Especially wrenching are scenes featuring the two of Jessop's children who felt torn between their parents and resented their mother for taking them away from the FLDS church. The book's final pages recount triumphs large and small, from getting her first stylish haircut to standing up to her husband in court. Though Jessop's circumstances were unusual-and particularly harrowing—her memoir will appeal to many women who have left abusive relationships.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Escape:

1. Discuss the authoritarian roles of men versus the submissive roles of women in the FLDS, particularly in light of the following comment Carolyn Jessop, made elsewhere:

Women in the polygamist culture are looked at as property, as a piece of meat. We are not looked upon as human beings with rights. The Women are basically baby-producers. It's a difficult thing to break away from. You don't contest it.
              — Nick Madigan, New York Times 6/29/05).

2. Why it is so difficult for women to break away from the FLDS? Recall Jessop's statement in the book that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." What about Jessop's sister?

3. Talk about Carolyn's own mother and her erratic behavior.

4. Discuss Merril and the kind of man he is. Also talk about the competition between Merril's wives. Wouldn't you think—at least hope—that they would have been supportive of one another?

5. Can children raised in such an isolated and sequestered culture, with few outside influences or alternatives available to them, be considered to choose FLDS "freely" when they arrive at adulthood?

6. In a society that respects religious freedom, what is the government's role with respect to FLDS—especially with polygamy, physical abuse, and under-aged marriage? Do laws to protect women and children against abuse trump Constitutional rights for religious freedom? In other words, if the state intervenes, is it protection...or is it interference in private religious and family matters? (For FLDS, religious salvation depends on a man's fathering many children from different wives.) Tricky questions.

7. Talk about religious fundamentalism in general—Christian, Jewish, or Islamic. To what degree are fundamentalists in any religion alike? What are the root causes of such strict beliefs? Does fundamentalism undermine a society (not counting threats of terrorism) or can it be a source of strength?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Travels with Charley: In Search of America
John Steinbeck, 1962
Penguin Group USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140053203


Summary
To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, in September 1960, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.

With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives through scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous super high-ways. This chronicle of their trip, a picaresque tale, follows the two as they meander from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases.

Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycle of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way. He dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. And he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, on a particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and on the unexpected kindness of strangers that is also a very real part of our national identity.

Originally published in 1962, Travels provides an intimate and personal look at one of America’s most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. It was written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—and is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—February 27, 1902
• Where—Salinas, California USA
• Death—December 20, 1968
• Where—New York, NY
• Education—Studied marine biology at Stanford University,
   1919-25
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940;
   Nobel Prize, 1962.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County.

In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas.

Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.

After moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. He felt encouraged to continue writing, relying on extensive research and personal observation of the human drama for his stories. In 1937, Of Mice and Men was published. Two years later, the novel was produced on Broadway and made into a movie. In 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Grapes of Wrath, bringing to public attention the plight of dispossessed farmers.

After Steinbeck and Henning divorced in 1942, he married Gwyndolyn Conger. The couple moved to New York City and had two sons, Thomas and two years later, John. During the war years, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches reappeared in Once There Was A War. In 1945, Steinbeck published Cannery Row and continued to write prolifically, producing plays, short stories and film scripts. In 1950, he married Elaine Anderson Scott and they remained together until his death.

Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and keen social perception." In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck summarized what he sought to achieve through his works:

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.... Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity of greatness of heart and spirit—gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature...

Steinbeck remained a private person, shunning publicity and moving frequently in his search for privacy. He died on December 20, 1968 in New York City, where he and his family made a home. But his final resting place was the valley he had written about with such passion. At his request, his ashes were interred in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas. He is survived by his son, Thomas. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of the National Steinbeck Center.)

Book Reviews 
(Older books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Travels with Charley:

1. What anxieties do people express to Steinbeck, and how do those fears affect the political atmosphere? Are there similarities between that time and ours—the nuclear vs. terrorist threat?

2. Steinbeck considers that radio and teen popular music will minimize regional differences. Fifty years later, was he right? And is this good or badt?

3. Compare Steinbeck's assessment of technology in the 1960's with new technologies of today. What are the impacts, in his day and ours? Are they similar or different; good or harmful?

4. How has car travel changed over the past 50 years? (Think local vs. chain motels and restaurants, country roads v. the Interstate.)

5. To what extent does geography reflect (or cause?) Americans' attitudes then...and now. What regional attitudes did Steinbeck encounter? Are they different or similar today.

6. Talk about Lonesome Harry and what he represents.

7. What is Steinbeck's attitude toward immigration and idea of America as a "melting-pot"? What did it mean to be an American in the 1960's vs. today?

8. If you could change one thing in America, what would it be?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

An American Childhood
Annie Dillard, 1987
HarperCollins
255 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060915186


Summary
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.

Annie Dillard recalls a childhood of exuberance, exploration, and fun. She throws snowballs and pitches balls; she draws— everything from bugs to poets; and she reads with what will eventually become her lifelong fascination with language and story telling. This is a childhood filled with joy, humor, and charm—the story of a young girl awakening to the wonders of life around her. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 30, 1945
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Hollins College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (1975); Academy Award for
   Literature, American Academy of Arts & Letters; National
   Endowment for the Arts Grant; New York Public LIbrary
   Literary Lion; Guggenheim Foundation Grant.
• Currently—lives in New York City


Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, and fiction. She is married to the historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Dillard describes her childhood at length in An American Childhood. She is the oldest of three daughters, born to affluent parents who raised her in an environment that encouraged humor, creativity, and exploration. Her mother was a non-conformist and incredibly energetic. Her father taught her everything from plumbing to economics to the intricacies of the novel On The Road. Dillard's childhood was filled with days of piano and dance classes, rock and bug collecting, and devouring the books on the shelves of the public library. But there were also many troubles—like the horrors of war, which she often read about.

After graduating from high school, Dillard attended Hollins College (Hollins University since 1998), in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, the poet R. H. W. Dillard (her maiden name is Doak)—the person she says "taught her everything she knows" about writing. In 1968 she graduated with a Masters in English, after writing a 40-page thesis on Thoreau's Walden, which focused on the use of Walden Pond as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." The next couple of years after graduation Dillard spent painting and writing. During this time, she published several poems and short stories.

Dillard's family did not attend Presbyterian church but when she was a child she and her sister did.She also spent a few summers at a fundamentalist summer camp. During her rebellious teenage years, she quit church because of the "hypocrisy." When she told her minister, he gave her a stack of books by C. S. Lewis, which ended this rebellion. After her college years, Dillard became, as she says, "spiritually promiscuous," incorporating the ideas of many religious systems into her own religious understanding. Not only are there references to Christ and the Bible in her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but also to Judaism, Buddhism, Sufism, and even Eskimo spirituality. In the 1990s, Dillard converted to Roman Catholicism.

After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971, Dillard decided that she needed to experience life more fully and began work on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, a suburban area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and myriad animal life. When she wasn't in the library, she spent her time outdoors, walking and camping. After living there for about a year, Dillard began to write about her experiences near the creek. She started by transposing notes from her twenty-plus-volume reading journal. It took her eight months to turn the notecards into the book. Towards the end of the eight months, she was so absorbed that she sometimes wrote for fifteen hours a day, cut off from society without interest in current events (like the Watergate scandal). The finished book brought her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 at the age of twenty-nine. Her other books in this vein include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and For the Time Being. She has also written a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood, and two novels, The Living, and 2007's The Maytrees.

Dillard spent some years as a faculty member in the English department at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Annie Dillard has turned her attention to her own world in An American Childhood, a lyrical look at her idyllic and privileged childhood in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.... [She] captures the genius loci of at least a part of the city then and lovingly describes her unorthodox, caring parents. Her father, who not only helped make the classic cult movie "Night of the Living Dead" but read On the Road at least as many times as she did ("approximately a million"), "walked lightly, long-legged, like a soft-shoe hoofer barely in touch with the floor." Her mother, an "unstoppable force," always reminded her that she didn't know everything yet and gave her "the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number." Along with the idea that Annie and her two sisters were "expected to take a stand," her mother also clearly passed on her love of language. One of Dillard's hilarious retellings is of her mother overhearing the play-by-play of a Sunday afternoon baseball game and asking of the phrase "Terwilliger bunts one," "Is that English?" In summing up the compelling characters surrounding her, Dillard writes, "Everyone in the family was a dancing fool," making us all want that family. Reading, for Dillard, took on a life of its own. It became what W.D. Wetherell, in his review of this book for The Post, called her "most requited" love. She responded to the "dreamlike interior murmur of books" and "opened books like jars."
Washington Post - Book World


A vivid and thoughtful evocation of particular personal experiences that have an exuberantly timeless appeal."
Chicago Sun-Times


Every paragraph Dillard writes is full of information, presenting the mundane with inventive freshness and offering exotic surprises as dessert...[Annie Dillard] is one of nature's prize wonders herself--an example of sentient homo sapiens pushing the limits of the creative imagination. She deserves our close attentions.
St. Louis Dispatch


Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard's mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity. The events of childhood often loom larger than life; the magic of Dillard's writing is that she sets down typical childhood happenings with their original immediacy and force.
Publishers Weekly


Dillard's account of her childhood until her entrance into Hollins College is delightful, fast-paced, and full of action. Written in three parts, with a prologue about her father's brief sea venture when she was eight and an epilogue about her own children, the book reads like a play: there is excellent character development, and the vivid descriptions make the reader almost a witness to the events. Dillard fans will especially appreciate the insight she offers into her early consciousness and development, while others will enjoy this picture of growing up in the 1950s or simply the humor and sensitivity of the writing. Highly recommended. —Carolyn M. Craft, English, Philosophy & Modern Languages Dept., Longwood Coll., Farmville, Va.
Library Journal


Dillard has amassed a following for her eloquently-written nature essays with their deeply philosophical, theolog ical slant. In this current work she re veals a personal view of her childhood and early adolescence in which she first awoke to the world and its implications. Dillard grew up with a relentlessly inquir ing mind in a moneyed Pittsburgh family during the '50s. Her liberal-minded par ents allowed her free rein to grow up exploring her city, taking up hobbies and projects, and reading everything she found on the public library's adult shelves. Especially compelling is her picture of her teenage years, the time when she ``morally disapproved most things in North America, and blamed her innocent parents for them.'' She cap tures that fine, open innocence of the '50s and that hungry pain of the '60s. This book should be read by young people far enough away from childhood to enjoy looking back at how they were, by young people just discovering themselves, and by those teenagers who can identify with Dillard's description of herself as ``a live wire. . .shooting out sparks that were digging a pit around me, and I sinking into that pit.'' Assuredly, it will be appreciat ed by those who enjoy reading wonder fully crafted prose. Her's is a smooth, knowing voice that can deliver a punch line. —Carolyn Praytor Boyd, Episcopal High School, Bellaire.
School Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

top of page (summary)