Plot/Summary:
Scott Russell Sanders spent his first five years on a small farm outside of Memphis where the natural world taught him some of his earliest lessons and an older boy awakened him to racial prejudice. He was also awakened to an atmosphere of shame as his parents fought over his father's problem with alcohol. Later, Sanders falls in love with science along with a girl from Indiana named Ruth, his future wife. But eventually he turns from physics to the study of literature and discovers a way to articulate his experiences with awe.  

Comments:
Sanders writes eloquently of his overwhelming love of family and the natural world. Between his reflections on the cycle of decline and renewal, his mother's disappearance into Alzheimer's and his baby granddaughter's awakening to the world, he tells the important stories in his life's journey. An author of essays and novels, Sanders teaches on the faculty of Indiana University.

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Reviewed by ds, 5/2009. Other reviews by ds. Have you read this book? Tell us what you think!