A Private History of Awe [Hardcover]

Scott Russell Sanders (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0865476934 | ISBN-13: 978-0865476936 | Publication Date: February 21, 2006

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 writes, “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 his search, told as a series of dramatic, spiritually charged 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, after the heady experience of education at Brown and Cambridge, to return to the Midwest and raise a family in the place of his 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 in ordinary lives while never resorting to formula. And by framing his recollections with present-day accounts of tending to his ailing mother and his newborn granddaughter, he weaves his story into the larger history of his family, illuminating the cycles of life that bind together generations.
       In his hands, the pattern of American coming of age made classic by writers from Mark Twain to Tobias Wolff is given a powerful new charge.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sanders attempts to transform what is in many ways a typical baby boomer experience—adolescence in the shadow of the cold war, a struggle with faith in college, conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam—into something archetypal, and very nearly succeeds. Much of the book deals with Sanders's early life in "a family more afraid of shame than of silence," with undercurrents of tension between an alcoholic father and a moralizing mother, but he continually returns to the present, where his mother is going through the final stages of physical and mental decline just as his infant granddaughter begins to discover the world around her. Sanders, an accomplished novelist and essayist (The Force of Spirit), is enamored of the "magical power" of words and occasionally succumbs to ponderousness ("lovers do not so much make love as they are remade by love"). But in the most moving passages—when he describes the revulsion he felt as a teenager witnessing a deer hunt, or marvels at his granddaughter's first steps—he floods the reader with the raw emotional power of his memories. His generational peers will find themselves nodding in silent recognition early and often.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Sanders, a sage of the Midwest, uses autobiography as a vehicle for far-reaching reflections on nature and humankind. Here he considers awe, that "rapturous, fearful, bewildering emotion." Writing with the plainspoken precision and wholesomeness he's cherished for, Sanders revisits his boyhood, singling out moments of awe instigated by the glory of nature, his tempestuous father and steadfast mother, and painful awakenings to death, racism, and war (during the 1950s they lived within a heavily guarded bomb-making compound in Ohio). As Sanders comes of age, he struggles to reconcile his budding passion for science with his family's religious practice. Then in college, he drops physics, appalled by science's connections to the military and the Vietnam War. Interleaved among vivid memories are graceful present-day reports on the joy radiating from his baby granddaughter and the sorrows attendant on caring for his Alzheimer's--afflicted mother. Sanders' thoughtful reflections on the cycles of life, the flashpoints of awe, and our quest for meaning are quietly revelatory. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (February 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865476934
• ISBN-13: 978-0865476936
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,091,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Note from the Author:, February 17, 2006

By 

S. R. Sanders (White River Valley, Indiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Private History of Awe (Hardcover)

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

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sanders is an excellent translator of the awe we sometimes overlook..., March 26, 2006

By 

Brandon Moss (New Philadelphia, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Private History of Awe (Hardcover)

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.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A private history, April 8, 2006

By 

Hoosier Girl (Indianapolis IN) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Private History of Awe (Hardcover)

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.