4.18 avg rating — 54,134 ratings

""[...] an angry and eloquent writer" ("Tales of Grandeur, Tales of Risk," 122). In her afterword to Modern American Memoirs, she includes this book in the bibliography (441). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (318).
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3.87 avg rating — 12,922 ratings

"In her afterword to Modern American Memoirs, she includes this book in the bibliography (441)."

3.63 avg rating — 4,934 ratings

""I like its vigorous thought and its assumption that an account of one's intellectual life is indeed an account of one's life" (bibliography from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 155). In her introduction to Modern American Memoirs, where an excerpt from this book is reprinted (433-440), she says, "Irony about onseself, at any age, becomes the memoirist better. Henry Adams is steadily ironic. His Education of Henry Adams scants a lifetime of extraordinary achievement; he claims to be puzzled throughout, and 'trying to get an education' " (x). Also included in "My New England Bookshelf" (66)."

4.30 avg rating — 577,770 ratings

"In her afterword to Modern American Memoirs, she includes this book in the bibliography (441)."

4.10 avg rating — 7,544 ratings

"Calls it "vivid and genial," and says that, like, "Most of the best memoirs," it "refrain[s] from examining the self at all" (Bibliography from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 156). Excerpted in Modern American Memoirs (49-67)."

4.07 avg rating — 3,915 ratings

""This Cape Cod masterpiece is broad and simple" (Bibliography from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 157). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (321) and "Tales of Grandeur, Tales of Risk" (122)."

4.08 avg rating — 944 ratings

""This is a perfectly structured work of art, a well-made exemplum of grace" ("Critic's Christmas Choices," 694)."

3.91 avg rating — 1,541 ratings

"Mentioned in Encounters with Chinese Writers, where she calls the latter, "A major American novel, out of the question" (24). In her introduction to Modern American Memoirs, she includes his early stories in a list of the twentieth century's "finest works of fiction [that] have strongly autobiographical elements" (xi) and in Teaching a Stone to Talk mentioned "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car" as a story that "moved me" (132). In "My New England Bookshelf," she says he "continues to lead American letters in the path of righteousness [...]" (68). Also mentioned in "Critic's Christmas Choices" (693)."

3.93 avg rating — 17,873 ratings

"Mentioned in Encounters with Chinese Writers, where she calls the latter, "A major American novel, out of the question" (24). In her introduction to Modern American Memoirs, she includes his early stories in a list of the twentieth century's "finest works of fiction [that] have strongly autobiographical elements" (xi) and in Teaching a Stone to Talk mentioned "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car" as a story that "moved me" (132). In "My New England Bookshelf," she says he "continues to lead American letters in the path of righteousness [...]" (68). Also mentioned in "Critic's Christmas Choices" (693)."

3.96 avg rating — 2,501 ratings

""Turnbull is an utterly engaging anthropologist [...]" ("Tales of Grandeur, Tales of Risk," 122). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (319)."

4.10 avg rating — 924,058 ratings

"In an interview, she said, "who would not like to have written [...] Anna Karenina?" ("Into the Yellow Wood," 161). "I often reread books. [...] Tolstoy [...] gets better and better" ("Remembrances of Things Past," 78)."

3.77 avg rating — 203,401 ratings

3.75 avg rating — 1,295 ratings

3.85 avg rating — 1,536 ratings

4.50 avg rating — 8 ratings

"In "Thinking About Language," she calls The Lives of a Cell "a wholly excellent book" "

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 478 ratings

""[...] beautifully written, unsentimental" ("Natural History: An Annotated Booklist," 318). Also included in "Tales of Grandeur, Tales of Risk" (122)."

4.10 avg rating — 631 ratings

""I love him. Every single thing. I think that Americans have been reading the wrong books. They keep reading The Phenomenon of Man, which is just pretty much crackpot, and they don't read the wonderful things, the 'Mass of the World' and The Divine Milieu. He enters the realm as I try to enter the realm, where nothing can be said but in art, but in metaphor, but in simile--because words fail and reason fails, as everyone knows. Only art can enter those realms, however pathetically" ("Natural Wonders: An Interview with Annie Dillard"). In For the Time Being, she praises The Divine Milieu and his essays "The Mass of the World" and "The Heart of the Matter" as "intelligent, plausible, and beautiful" (103). "

4.55 avg rating — 22 ratings

""A tour de force [...] learn from the master where we live" ("Tales of Grandeur, Tales of Risk," 122). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (321).
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4.17 avg rating — 22,659 ratings

""She's wonnn-der-fulll. [... These books] set me onto science, and I've been on science ever since I read it in the seventh or eighth grade" ("A Pilgrim's Progress"). The last book is included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (321) and the bibliography in her afterword to Modern American Memoirs (445).
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4.19 avg rating — 8,046 ratings

"She says, "This is about as moving a work of literature as has ever been written" in "My Favorite Historical Novel" (87), where it is listed as one of her favorite historical novels. Journalist Mary K. Feeney says that if Dillard "had voted on her choices" for "the Modern Classics roster of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century," she would have included, among others, this book ("Reading Between the Lines," A1). Old Dominion University's The Courier writes that Dillard "has called [Smith] 'the best of the younger generation of Southern writers' " (5)."

4.39 avg rating — 453 ratings

"She called it the "best biography I've ever read in my whole life [...] It's all interior. It's like being married to somebody. [...] It's intimate. It's why I read biography: because you only get to live once, and this way you get to experience, from the inside, someone else's life' " ("Annie Dillard: Pilgrim's Progress," D3).
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4.14 avg rating — 35 ratings

""This general work inspired me to read dozens of studies in prehistory; of all of them, this one remains the most interesting" ("Critic's Christmas Choices," 694). In For the Time Being, she refers to him as "the ever fine writer" (99)."

4.25 avg rating — 372 ratings

""Richard K. Nelson is a very great, if not the greatest, nature writer we have. [...] Anyone can see stuff and learn facts; it's what you make of it. His rhetorical pitch was as wild as Thoreau's on Katahdin, transporting as Shakespeare pushing art into the realms that ennoble the reader. I finished The Island Within out of breath. [...]" ("The Nature Writer's Nature Writer," 56). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (315). In her afterword to Modern American Memoirs, she includes the first book in the bibliography (444). "

3.56 avg rating — 612,511 ratings

"Regarding the former: "[...] Moby-Dick is the greatest novel [...] [Melville is] our greatest artist. [...] I admire especially Melville's willing that it should all mean (all of it, even the facts), his all-or-nothing stab at greatness in the novel, his urgency and power, his book's splendor and scale" ("My New England Bookshelf," 66-67). "The best book ever written about nature" ("Natural History: An Annotated Booklist," 316). The latter is included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (315) as well."

4.18 avg rating — 61 ratings

""In beautiful, formal, vivid language, the writer describes his blind, vigorous boyhood in India" (bibliography from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 158). In her afterword to Modern American Memoirs, she includes this book in the bibliography (444). Also mentioned in "Reading for Work and Pleasure" (66)."

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings

""This memoir is a treasure because of its extraordinary depth of feeling. The thoughtfulness he brings to bear on his life, his modesty, and his rare literary ability to push events through to meanings, make this memoir a rich find for people who love literature" ("What They're Reading"). "[...] I admire its structural integrity and literary intelligence" (bibliography from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 156). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (321). Excerpted in Modern American Memoirs (345-54)."

4.46 avg rating — 162,569 ratings

"She says it is, "of the many expedition books I've read, the most vivid and stirring. [...] I return to this book as a lab rat pushes its bar for hits of endorphins. Its intensity never fails" ("Antarctica"). "I buy every copy I see; so do all my friends" (Writer’s Choice: A Library of Rediscoveries, 223). Also listed as one of her two favorite selections in "Tales of Grandeur, Tales of Risk" (122)."

4.23 avg rating — 2,705 ratings

""What radical conclusion could I reach, what revolutionary course could I preach, that I couldn't find in Emerson? How did this dizzying poseur and corrupter of youth get wrapped up as a fuddy-duddy and thrown away? He calls each of us to the same impossible task: forging an original relationship with the universe" ("My New England Bookshelf," 66). "My approach to spirituality is intellectual, in the Neoplatonic tradition. That's why I'm also attracted to Christian mysticism, American transcendentalism [...], and Hasidism" ("The Good Books: Writer's Choices," 80). Also included in "Natural History: An Annotated Booklist" (316)."

4.04 avg rating — 178,221 ratings

"Listed as one of her favorite historical novels in "My Favorite Historical Novel" (87)."

4.41 avg rating — 82 ratings

"These poems are masterpieces. You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study, and have lived well. The fabric of their meaning is seamless, inexhaustible. ... their language is steely and bladelike; from both of its surfaces flickering lights gleam. Each page sheds insight on every other page; understanding snaps back and forth, tacking like a sloop up the long fjord of mystery" ("Winter Melons," 90). At the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing, she said that "it's my favorite book in the whole world.""