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 &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 inAn American Childhoodmerely 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;