She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. Schroff acknowledges risks-including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides-but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism.

The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. as dolphins burst through the seas.'Ī straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York. An overview of one particular childhood told with shiver and bounce, and another Dillard voyage of discovery as she continues to 'break up through the skin of awareness. Throughout, Dillard rumples up the placid life. There are tales of mischief-making, dances and boys, school and the fine and splendid rages of adolescence ('I was a dog barking between my own ears').

In between accounts of such fabulous flights and efforts of concentration which 'draw you down so very deep,' there are delightful portraits of a set of attractive parents (shameless connoisseurs of jokes, both ancient and practical) and not unaffectionate views of Pittsburgh's Old Guard, at Country Club play to actually praying (to teen-ager Dillard's angry astonishment) in sables and tailcoats, in their gold-plated church). To the tot, 'mindless and eternal,' playing on the kitchen floor, will come, in the roaring flood of time, 'the breakthrough shift between seeing, and knowing you see.' Aware as the dickens, Dillard found that everything in the world is 'an outcrop of some vast vein of knowledge.' The child Dillard will read books 'to delirium,' investigate rocks and insects, 'pry open a landscape' with a microscope, draw faces, and just because it felt marvelous, pretend to fly, arms flapping, clown a Pittsburgh main street. There is less tugging at the rare insight, the wild surmise, as in, say, Dillard's Teaching the Stone to Talk (1982), and this bright, imaginative whack through the 'overgrown path' back to the past is more accessible to the general reader. Dillard's headlong immersion into the mysteries of the natural world-from bedrocks to the heavens, and flora and fauna (from amoebas to us)-places this childhood memoir of life with a companionable family in Pittsburgh's elite enclave in the 50's and 60's.

An american childhood