Reviews for A lucky American childhood

The average rating for A lucky American childhood based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-31 00:00:00 Ashley Allen I finished this a few weeks ago, but I'm just now finally getting around to writing about it. I love memoirs & I love Iowa, so Engle's recounting of his childhood in Cedar Rapids during the early 20th century was absolutely wonderful for me. Plus I'm kind of envious hearing how his childhood as a horseman's son led to him becoming a Rhodes Scholar and spending time in Europe on the eve of WWII, and eventually founding the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. The best thing is that, unlike listening to an elderly neighbor's painful recounting of their now dim childhood memories, Engle is a gifted writer and strings along an interesting collection of vignettes. While the chapters are mostly self-contained and only somewhat chronological, somehow it all seems to fit together in an unexpectedly perfect way. If you like this sort of thing, you could do a lot worse.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-09 00:00:00 Guylaine Maine A memoir by Paul Engle, who directed the Iowa Writers Workshop for decades and also founded the Iowa International Writers Workshop. This book tells of his childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, back in the days when some people thought cars were a passing fad. The book is full of imagery and descriptions of things of all the senses; vivid memories of what that Engle missed as the world modernized and became more "antiseptic". But his use of imagery is indicative of his status as a poet; prose is not his "native language", and since there was not really a plot or story line (except a few anecdotes in some chapters), I found the reading a bit laborious. But it did make Cedar Rapids, as he described the rich diversity that constituted it, more than just "that blue collar city to the north", which seems to be the Iowa City opinion.