|
You are here:
Home > Cook Books > Buzz Aldrin > Item
|
A Private History of Awe
|
by Scott Russell Sanders
Sales Rank : 229421
|
|
|
|
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: North Point Press; 1st edition March 6, 2007
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0865477345
ISBN-13: 978-0865477346
Product Dimensions:
8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Sanders attempts to transform what is in many ways a typical baby boomer experience—adolescence in the shadow of the cold war, a struggle with faith in college, conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam—into something archetypal, and very nearly succeeds. Much of the book deals with Sanders's early life in "a family more afraid of shame than of silence," with undercurrents of tension between an alcoholic father and a moralizing mother, but he continually returns to the present, where his mother is going through the final stages of physical and mental decline just as his infant granddaughter begins to discover the world around her. Sanders, an accomplished novelist and essayist (The Force of Spirit), is enamored of the "magical power" of words and occasionally succumbs to ponderousness ("lovers do not so much make love as they are remade by love"). But in the most moving passages—when he describes the revulsion he felt as a teenager witnessing a deer hunt, or marvels at his granddaughter's first steps—he floods the reader with the raw emotional power of his memories. His generational peers will find themselves nodding in silent recognition early and often.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Sanders, a sage of the Midwest, uses autobiography as a vehicle for far-reaching reflections on nature and humankind. Here he considers awe, that "rapturous, fearful, bewildering emotion." Writing with the plainspoken precision and wholesomeness he's cherished for, Sanders revisits his boyhood, singling out moments of awe instigated by the glory of nature, his tempestuous father and steadfast mother, and painful awakenings to death, racism, and war (during the 1950s they lived within a heavily guarded bomb-making compound in Ohio). As Sanders comes of age, he struggles to reconcile his budding passion for science with his family's religious practice. Then in college, he drops physics, appalled by science's connections to the military and the Vietnam War. Interleaved among vivid memories are graceful present-day reports on the joy radiating from his baby granddaughter and the sorrows attendant on caring for his Alzheimer's--afflicted mother. Sanders' thoughtful reflections on the cycles of life, the flashpoints of awe, and our quest for meaning are quietly revelatory. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
|
|
|
|
