Would the music be loud enough? This is a question that often crosses our minds when we are looking forward to a music event or simply enjoying music at home.

Loudness is an important aspect of music as it can enhance the overall experience. It can make us feel more engaged, excited, and even transported to another world. However, what constitutes as "loud enough" can vary from person to person.

Some people prefer their music to be blasting at a high volume, while others may find it too overwhelming. It also depends on the type of music and the context in which it is being played. For example, a rock concert may require a much louder volume than a classical music recital.

In addition, the acoustics of the venue or the quality of the speakers can also affect the perception of loudness. A well-designed concert hall with excellent acoustics can make the music sound louder and clearer, even at a relatively lower volume.

So, the next time you ask yourself whether the music will be loud enough, consider these factors and decide what level of loudness will best suit your preferences and the situation. After all, the goal is to enjoy the music to the fullest.

If you are a Charlotte Mason educator, then you are surely going to want to read this book. Annie's childhood memoir is filled with an abundance of organic elements that we seek in a CM education. It's as if she was planted in the most precious of soils. Most notably, Annie had a unique way of seeing, which she似乎 picked up from sketching. This developed in her an acute habit of attention, which she further supplemented with wide reading. All of this was nurtured by parents who practiced a great deal of "wise and purposeful letting alone."

The book is beautifully written, to boot.

Here is a favorite section:

“Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere to be seen. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows overlooked blooming rhododendrons.

Mother regarded me warmly. She made it clear that she was glad I had found what I was looking for, but that she and father were content to sit with their coffee and would not be coming down.

She didn't say it, but I understood immediately that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She didn't say it, but I began to realize then that you do what you do out of your personal passion for the thing itself.

I had essentially been given my own life. In the following years, my parents would praise my drawings and poems, supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved in my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.”

I attempted to read Annie Dillard during my college days, yet I simply couldn't understand her works. However, last summer, I reread Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the second time, and this time, it all made sense. It wasn't just an intellectual understanding - although it was intellectually satisfying - but this time, it touched something deep within my soul.

So, I approached _An American Childhood_ with anticipation, and I was not let down. Dillard has managed to craft a memoir that is both nostalgic and brutally honest, hazy yet precise, idealized yet imperfect - as if this is the essence of being American.

I read the book slowly and leisurely over several months, picking it up whenever I wanted to reflect on experiences or relish the language. Dillard transforms the daily activities of growing up - dancing in the living room, riding a bike around town, sitting bored in church - into the stuff of dreams. In her memory, Pittsburgh is filled with untapped potential, and the angst of adolescence is simply the state of "the child of the 20th century."

We are all like Dillard in some ways, and yet none of us are exactly like her. Like her, we desire our rough edges "to cut a hole in the world's surface."

I truly liked that contemporary window into the Salk polio vaccine trials.

In 1953, Jonas Salk's Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh had developed a rather controversial vaccine for polio. The small stories about it in the Pittsburgh Press and the Post-Gazette were also emerging in Life and Time. Medical colleagues across the nation were quick to criticize, stating that Salk had gone public without first publishing all the details in the journals. He had rushed out a killed-virus serum instead of waiting for a potentially better safe live-virus one. As a result, doctors walked out of professional meetings, and some even quit the foundation that funded the testing. They accused Salk of being after personal glory, of being after money, and of being after big prizes.

Salk tested the serum on five thousand Pittsburgh school-children, and I was among them at the age of three, as I kept changing elementary schools. Our parents, like ninety-five percent of all Pittsburgh parents, signed the consent forms. I wonder if the other mothers then bent over the desk in relief and sobbed. I really don't know. But I don't suppose any of them gave much of a damn what Salk had been after. They just wanted their children to be safe from the可怕的 polio virus.

This isn't a "bad" book,

but it simply wasn't the kind of book that suited my taste. The writing style was overly flowery,

and it didn't give the impression of a coherent story. Instead, it seemed like a haphazard collection of memories.

There were parts where she rambled on for far too long about her rock collection and other such things.

Part 3 did finally begin to stitch these elements together into a semblance of a story,

but I still didn't feel as though I truly got to know her story.

It was just a jumble of random memories.

The underlying theme of the power of reading and what one can learn from it was present,

but overall, I had the sense that I wasn't "intelligent" enough to fully appreciate this particular book.

Perhaps someone with a different perspective or a greater affinity for this type of writing would find more to enjoy in it.

But for me, it just didn't quite hit the mark.

Recommended as an example of outstanding memoir writing in On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser, this work offers a unique perspective.

In the movie My Dinner With Andre, Andre's tales of seeking spiritual enlightenment in far-off places like Poland, Japan, and Tibet contrast with Wally's more down-to-earth view. Wally wonders if such distant travels are truly necessary, suggesting that understanding could perhaps be found closer to home, like in the neighboring cigar store. Andre counters that modern society has so warped and alienated us that a radical cultural experience from around the world is needed to jolt us out of our complacency.

Anne Dillard could serve as a counter-example to Andre's argument. She was able to extract spiritual experiences from the seemingly dull details of everyday life in an American city. With the help of rock samples, a beginner's microscope, an attentive but not overly slavish interest in The Bible, and remarkable powers of observation, she was able to find meaning and wonder in the ordinary.

Sometimes, I am reluctantly involved in church book groups, which I often find painful due to the fuzzy language in the books. However, this book might be a good choice for spiritually-themed book groups that don't want to overly torment their members. It contains enough concrete, recognizable day-to-day life to appeal to those of us who are too literal-minded for much of the churchy literature.

As Zinsser promised, the writing is good. But it won't appeal to everyone. For example, as of writing, the highest-ranking review on Goodreads was from someone who was unmoved by Annie Dillard's affection for her rock collection. While the reviewer has a point that the author is recalling childhood trivia, we read it because we respect someone who is so observant and can make us feel deeply her experiences.

The author's life in 1950's Pittsburgh seems almost impossibly old-fashioned and exotic today. She was allowed to roam the city freely, talk to strangers without causing alarm, and her parents didn't smother her with attention. Their parenting techniques, as described in the book, would likely raise eyebrows today and might even prompt calls to Child Protective Services.

In conclusion, you read this book for the writing, which isn't for everyone. It contains a lot of words that might make you realize you didn't pay close enough attention in science class. Here are some of those words: windrow, travois, monadnock, poinciana, portulaca, eidetically, gangue, chrysoberyl, spodumene, gimlets, berm, trilobites, quondam, sempiternal, gallinule, asters.

It’s not often that I read memoirs; they seem, as a genre, somewhat too self-indulgent for me to spending several hundred pages mulling over at a time. I think I remember mentioning this to a friend of mine shortly after I graduated high school.

He was a friend whose passion for books mirrored my own and who genuinely appreciated my interest in nineteenth-century German philosophy. In response to what I told him of the memoir, he mentioned the name of Annie Dillard, and said that I might like “An American Childhood” and “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” I shelved these suggestions, so to speak, not thinking of them too much in the intervening ten years.

And then, a few months ago, I saw a pristine copy of “An American Childhood” resting all by itself on a table during an annual library book sale, for only a dollar. The John Kane painting on the cover, “Panther Hollow, Pittsburgh,” seemed quaint, reassuring, and spoke to me. I immediately thought of Will and our long talks, and somehow all of a sudden, this memoir in particular struck me as something I would enjoy.

Some of Dillard’s childhood is eerily close to home for me. Her open and universal sense of curiosity – for all kinds of books – those on rocks and minerals, history, science, and her childlike need to understand, classify, and organize. Others aspects of her early life may very well have taken place on another planet, at least for me: she grew up in an upper middle-class neighborhood, attended a private school, often frequented country clubs with her parents, and, as she says “grew up in a house full of comedians.”

Dillard’s writing brings out the full sense of what it may have felt like to grow up in the United States in the 1950s. It’s full of nostalgia, but not the mealy-mouthed, saccharine kind. She loves the order of life, or at least she did when she was a child.

Her mother stayed at home while her eccentric father both brought home the bacon, but also planned, and actually set out on, a Mark Twain-inspired, jazz-infused journey from Pittsburgh all the way down to New Orleans. (He soon returned, well before he reached his destination, from sheer loneliness.) She was largely left to her own devices to read, look at diatoms and euglena through her beloved microscope, and attend school dances.

But Dillard also catches with touching beauty how crushingly small this all was, and how insular. She didn’t know this as a child, surely, but she knows as a writer looking back that this smallness, the smallness of 1950s America, can have whole worlds constructed out of it. And that’s precisely what she set out to build, both in her childhood and in this book.

The way she combines her wide open curiosity with what is in some respects its opposite, the feeling of suburban provincialism of Protestant Pittsburgh, is still one more thing that makes this writing special. I always found Dillard a good storyteller in “An American Childhood,” but sometimes she mixes in short, insightful, quasi-philosophical asides.

Like this one on page 157 on personality, after recalling her two friends Ellin and Judy and her little sister Molly: “People’s being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously – what was it? Why was it so appealing? Personality, like beauty, was a mystery; like beauty, it was useless. These useless things were not, however, flourishes and embellishments to our life here, but that life’s center; they were its truest note, the heart of its form, which drew back our thoughts repeatedly.”

In a few spots, Dillard mentions her interest in lepidoptery. Just a few pages later, she paints one of the most memorable images in the entire book: that of a large butterfly on her schoolteacher’s desk. On the day it emerges from its chrysalis, she sees that the jar is too small for the butterfly – an especially large Polyphemus butterfly – to spread its wings.

The birth fluids dried in place, it couldn’t spread its wings, and blood was not able to spread throughout the blood vessels. Because of the size of its jar, it was left with permanently deformed, crumpled wings. Her and her classmates released it outside, even though she knew that it would inevitable end up eaten by a bird or batted to death by a cat paw.

“Nevertheless,” Dillard writes, “it was scrawling with what seemed wonderful vigor, as if, I thought at the time, it was still excited from being born.” There’s something about this dual sense of both wonderment mixed with human weakness, frailty, and anxiety that wonderfully frames “An American Childhood.”

Maybe one day soon, I will find “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” More likely, it will find me. I will think of Will again, and our long conversations. And so it goes, and so it goes.

I have the distinct feeling that I am going to have an even greater appreciation for Annie Dillard's books on the natural world after having delved into this memoir of her formative years and background.

An American Childhood offers an entertaining peek into the mind, childhood, influences, and trajectory of a budding observer - of everything. In essence, this memoir does seem to disclose aspects of what led Annie Dillard to a life of writing.

There are indeed moments and passages within the book where Dillard channels her inner-Walt Whitman, especially when enumerating long lists of examples. However, there is also an overlap with some of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. For the latter, both writers came of age during the prosperous American Century of the Baby Boom generation (and its gravitational pull). This Boomer's tale can, as is often the case with my generation, be a bit too enamored with its own story and significance within the sweep of American history.

An American Childhood's tone and structure vary from moment to moment. I'm not suggesting this is an issue; rather, the mosaic of Dillard's memory is diverse, colorful, and there are recognizable patterns she has imposed. Mostly, I was astounded by the level of detail Dillard could recall about Pennsylvania and her childhood memories. This might be attributed to her eventual writing career, but her memory and observational inclination are truly impressive. Even if the implied ellipses within sections without new chapters to organize them can cause a very mild sense of whiplash.

3.5 stars rounded down to 3. It's a fine mosaic of a writer's memoir.

A lovely, yet maddening book indeed. It doesn't belong to the category of autobiographies that are highly suspenseful, exotic, or tragic, which usually make one stay up way past bedtime flipping the pages. However, it does manage to capture certain childhood longings and sensations with such clear familiarity that at times, it feels as if one is reading pages from one's own life. Dillard's way with words is truly remarkable and hard to match. Her metaphors are startling, and her similes shine brightly. Every time one reads her magnificent prose, a sense of admiration fills them, bordering on envy.

But. At the same time, in this book, she, as a character, is extremely hard to love. Her upper-crust Pittsburgh way of life, with its country-club afternoons, white-glove dance lessons, elite girls' school ennui, and all the other trappings of high society, come across as sterile, insulated, and taken for granted. Her interior life seems to overshadow her relational life to such an extent that the entire autobiography focuses on her solitary musings rather than any real actions, friendships, or plot points. Every person in her life, even her loving and lively parents, still somehow come across as distant and even cold. Perhaps it's because she keeps the dialogue to a bare minimum?

If her inner musings weren't so wonderful, this book would be an unbearable bore. But with her gift for keen observation and beautiful description, she manages to keep the book afloat.

Most disappointing of all was the end. Her teenage self is simply a rage-filled, hormonally charged brat, and there her American childhood ends, not with a bang but a whine.

Excellent.

I think anyone who is curious and bookish would love Annie Dillard. Her writing is like a magical key that unlocks the hidden corners of the world and the human soul.

Annie Dillard has a unique way of observing and describing the simplest of things, making them seem extraordinary. Her words paint vivid pictures in the reader's mind, allowing us to experience the world through her eyes.

Whether she is writing about nature, human relationships, or the meaning of life, Dillard's prose is always engaging and thought-provoking. She has a deep understanding of the human condition and a remarkable ability to express complex emotions and ideas in a simple and accessible way.

If you are someone who loves to explore new ideas and expand your horizons, then Annie Dillard's books are a must-read. You will be captivated by her writing and inspired to look at the world in a new way.

I have lived in Pittsburgh for a while, and I really enjoyed reading this.

The portraits of life in the city, which is known as the "east coast of the Midwest," are really beautiful and thoughtfully crafted.

It gives a vivid and detailed picture of the unique charm and characteristics of Pittsburgh.

Moreover, I also share the author's sense of humor. The witty remarks and humorous descriptions in the book made me constantly snicker throughout the reading process.

It added an extra layer of enjoyment to the overall experience.

This book is not only a great read but also a wonderful exploration of the city of Pittsburgh.

It makes me appreciate the city even more and look forward to uncovering more of its hidden gems in the future.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in Pittsburgh or simply enjoys a good read with a touch of humor.

This is one of the best books I have ever read.

Annie Dillard writes about her childhood in Pittsburgh. As a child, she dabbled in various activities such as drawing, sports, music, dancing, intense and extensive reading, collecting, and observing "small creatures" under a microscope. However, it seems she did more than just dabble; she wholeheartedly threw herself into every endeavor.

She writes about becoming aware of the world around her, and she is the first writer I've come across who has managed to capture my own sense of wonder when waking up to the world and realizing that I am a part of it. She beautifully describes the importance of that moment of awakening, of finding a place in the world and feeling a connection to it.

This book is not a typical chronicle of names, dates, or places. Instead, it is a collection of moments of awakening to the world, presented in new and unique ways. Every line in the book is exquisite and carefully crafted. Her writing is honest and revealing, without being didactic or smug. It is a truly remarkable piece of work that I would highly recommend to anyone.