Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader's Life

An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader's Life

Dirda, Michael

Paperback

Biographies General

ISBN10: 0393326144
ISBN13: 9780393326147
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: Dec 1 2004
Pages: 335
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.93 Width: 5.61 Depth: 8.26
Language: English

All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book, Michael Dirda's steelworker father used to complain, worried about his son's passion for reading. In An Open Book, one of the most delightful memoirs to emerge in years, the acclaimed literary journalist Michael Dirda re-creates his boyhood in rust-belt Ohio, first in the working-class town of Lorain, then at Oberlin College. In addition to his colorful family and friends, An Open Book also features the great writers and fictional characters who fueled Dirda's imagination: from Green Lantern to Sherlock Holmes, from Candy to Proust. The result is an affectionate homage to small-town America summer jobs, school fights, sweepstakes contests, and first dates as well as a paean to what could arguably be called the last great age of reading. Dirda is a superb literary essayist. Harold Bloom Michael Dirda's memoir no surprise to me is so good that I went up to the attic meaning to send him one of my antique Big Little books as a salute to excellence...A great job. I'll be buying An Open Book for my children and grandchildren. Russell Baker, author of Growing Up Here, in An Open Book, is the show and tell of a wonderful American story, everything coming together in the immemorial dance of literature and memory, of history and gossip, and of the deeply felt, bittersweet story (his own) of a young life. Read it and rejoice. George Garrett A lovely, unapologetically nostalgic remembrance of growing up in a more innocent America, but it is also the touching story of one person's lifelong love affair with words. June Sawyer, San Francisco Chronicle Dirda inhabits each book he reads. Inhabits it and makes a space alongside it for us to join him....He is a rare treasure. James Sallis, Boston Sunday Globe

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