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| |  | The Highwaymen | Home » » » Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters | | | | | | | Description: | | Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Annie Dillard | | Paperback:
| 176 pages | | Publisher:
| Harper Perennial | | Publication Date:
| September 01, 1988 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0060915412 | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 22 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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 Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie DillardJan 05, 2010
I read Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk at the request of a well-read friend who said it was "the strangest book she had ever read" and that she wanted very much to talk about it. And so, while halfway through Total Eclipse I found myself in an unknown eerie otherworldly realm that I did not quite understand, I stayed with the book and was generously rewarded by the experience. In the title story Teaching a Stone to Talk, Ms. Dillard floats between awe at the brilliant and intricate design of the universe and the gnawing fear that having chased God away back at Sinai ("the show we drove from town"), we might never again hear his voice ("What have we been doing for centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain...But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens").
In Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos, Dillard heaps praises on life's rich species diversity (which she attributes to geographic isolation), thankful because an alternative reality such as "No mountains and one salamander, one fiddle tune, would be a lesser world. No continents, no fiddlers...The earth, without form, is void."
My favorite story, however, is On a Hill Far Away. Beautifully capturing adult and child hopes and hesitations, and longings for and joy felt in human connection, Ms. Dillard ends with a twist, a taste of very human, more narcissistic impulses. "But I simply had to go. It was dark, it was cold, and I had a roast in the oven., lamb, and I don't like it too well done."
In short, a book to read and reread.
 Wonderful WritingDec 30, 2009
Dillard seems to have been everywhere and knows something about everything. If I had to label it, I'd call it a spiritual memoir with very fine writing. The final chapter is worth the price of the book.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Good essays by talented writerOct 21, 2009
I am a co-leader of our church's book club, and appreciate the speed with which you
delivered the collection of Annie Dillard's essays. I already knew about book and
author and my primary goal was to get a copy promptly, which you provided.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Teaching a reader to writeNov 19, 2007
Essays to tease the depths, this collection comprises some pf the best of Dillard's work. Clear insight and brilliant analogy move from the natural world to the soul. My recent re-read renewed my respect for Dillard's intellect and heart. How is the quest for the spiritual Absolute related to a voyage to a planetary pole? What equipment will you take? Do you believe you will return? Can one teach a stone to talk in this profane age when bushes no longer burn and mountains are silent? This is a book I am willing to loan, but my name and address are inside the cover. This is one comet I intend to witness again.
Immerse yourself in Annie Dillard's thoughts and unique use of languageSep 17, 2007
This is a book of timeless essays regarding our journey through life. Enjoy.
From the essay - Sojourners.
"We are down here in time, where beauty grows. Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and wing.
The planet is less like an enclosed spaceship-spaceship earth-than it is like an exposed mangrove island beautiful and loose. We the people started small and have since accumulated a great and solacing muck of soil, of human culture. We are rooted in it; we are bearing it with us across nowhere. The word 'nowhere' is our cue: the consort of musicians strikes up, and we in the chorus stir and move and start twirling our hats. A mangrove island turns drift to dance. It creates its own soil as it goes, rocking over the salt sea at random, rocking day and night and round the sun, rocking round the sun and out toward east of Hercules."
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