A Private History of Awe

by Scott Russell Sanders

Book Overview

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 -... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865476934
• ISBN13: 9780865476936
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A gift to me, and to my children

I love Sanders work. It takes me so deep that I can't read quickly, or skim, as I am wont to do. This one engaged me in a way that I sent copies to my adult daughters, and that is an infrequent act on my part. I commend it to you.

A private history

Near the end of A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders writes about his early days of teaching, when he looked for stories "in which a husband and wife love one another deeply, feel grateful toward their parents, look forward to becoming parents themselves, and then welcome into their marriage a child who arrives like an emissary straight from glory land." In the end, he finds no great novels about happy families, so he settled "for books whose authors clearly loved the world in spite of its darkness, and who held out hope for humankind in spite of our faults." This is one of those books. A deep pleasure to read, a record of human love.

Sanders is an excellent translator of the awe we sometimes overlook...

I initially bought this book for a friend--I knew he admired Sanders work. The more I looked at it, the more I decided I wanted to buy it and read it myself as well. I had read Sanders' "Hunting for Hope" and had been very inspired by his writing. He is very down-to-Earth and places himself not in the viewpoint of an expert offering advice and sage wisdom to a novice, but rather as a fellow questioner of the universe and the workings within. Upon reading this book, which I did in less than two days, I found that he has continued his style here, using his life's experiences to illustrate some things that he has questioned and learned, allowing the reader to take what he or she will from it. In talking about the past, Sanders often writes from the tone of the limited wisdom he had at whatever age he is illustrating, bringing forth the same questions he had then (and sometimes still has); this method of writing brings forth a kinship between Sanders and myself, a young man struggling with the meaning of life and questioning the consensus of values handed down by society. Reading this book assures Sanders' other books a spot on my to-read list for the near future. It is my wish that all of you take the time to read this book (and "Hunting for Hope", if not others). You'll find yourself nodding your head, laughing, empathizing, crying, smiling, and digging up the awe-some moments of your own life.

A Note from the Author:

A Private History of Awe is a coming-of-age memoir, love story, and spiritual testament. I never thought I would make such a book, wary as I am of memoirs and spirit-language. For years I shied away from writing about religious experience, in part because of the hostility that many literary readers show toward all references to spirituality, in part because these matters have always seemed to me better left private. Yet the questions I've kept returning to in my adult life are essentially religious ones, and I found myself unwilling to abandon this terrain to the televangelists and fundamentalists. Beginning with childhood intuitions of spirit in nature, the narrative recounts an education in ultimate things. My ethics were formed in conversation with the Midwestern landscape, the Bible, rural Methodist churches, science, literature, and family. Those influences prepared me to hear the wisdom in such inspired human beings as Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, Einstein, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Buddha. During the writing of this book, I spent many hours caring for my mother, as she suffered physical and mental decline, and caring for my first grandchild, as she launched into life with the marvelous energy and beauty natural to all healthy children. Together, the dwindling elder and burgeoning youngster made their way into the book, adding their twin stories of painful departure and exuberant entrance to the narrative of my own formative years. I'd like to believe that A Private History of Awe belongs to the tradition of American wisdom literature running from Emerson and Thoreau to Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard. I set out to describe my own brushes with the ground of being, the holy source of all that rises and passes, and to record my search for a language and way of life adequate to those experiences. The resulting book may irk true-believers at one extreme and militant secularists at the other. But I hope that readers who dwell between those extremes will find, as the Quakers say, that A Private History of Awe speaks to their condition. --SRS