Modern American Memoirs

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely imaginative and colorful composition
Review: This is one of the most intoxicating books I have ever read. Annie Dillard, one of America's most well known authors for her detailed illustrations of nature, has magnificently compiled a book of memoirs that colorfully describes the American society and its struggles throughout history. This book gives you the bitterness of struggles by various well known figures such as Malcolm X and Maxine Hong Kingston. It builds an intense image of the daily life in the most detailed and delicious way possible.

Rating:
Summary: The Art of the Personal
Review: This wonderful collection of autobiographical pieces is extraordinary in the variety of lives that are represented. I cover my eyes from Wallace Stegner's Saskatchewan dust and then I open them to witness the East River sunset from Barry Lopez' window. I sneak books out of a Memphis library with Richard Wright and then I'm with Cynthia Ozick digging out of a crate from the Traveling Library. The book's radiance comes not only from the rainbow of lives reflected but from the craftmanship, the nuts and bolts of changing the stuff of life into art. So many ways, so many self-less, ego-less ways to transform the personal into the universal, to say I am you and you are me and we are all.