An original and searching memoir from “one of America’s finest
essayists” (Phillip Lopate)When Scott Russell Sanders was four, his
father held him in his arms during a thunderstorm, and he felt
awe—“the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and
everything.” He says, “The search for communion with this power has
run like a bright thread through all my days.” A Private History of
Awe is an account of this search, told as a series of awe-inspiring
episodes: his early memory of watching a fire with his father; his
attraction to the solemn cadences of the Bible despite his
frustration with Sunday-school religion; his discovery of books and
the body; his mounting opposition to the Vietnam War and all forms of
violence; his decision to leave behind the university life of Oxford
and Harvard and return to Indiana, where three generations of his
family have put down roots. In many ways, this is the story of a
generation’s passage through the 1960s—from innocence to experience,
from euphoria to disillusionment. But Sanders has found a language
that captures the transcendence of ordinary lives while never
reducing them to formula. In his hands, the pattern of American
boyhood that was made classic by writers from Mark Twain to Tobias
Wolff is given a powerful new charge.
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