When All the World Was Young
A Memoir
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A Washington Post Bestseller
"Beautifully written . . . sharply detailed recollections . . . compelling, both touching and funny...Holland writes with breezy elegance and a sly wit."-The New York Times Book Review
The author deemed "a national treasure" finally tells her own story, with this sharp and atmospheric memoir of a postwar American childhood.
Barbara Holland finally brings her wit and wisdom to the one subject her fans have been clamoring for for years: herself. When All the World Was Young is Holland's memoir of growing up in Washington, D.C. during the 1940s and 50s, and is a deliciously subversive, sensitive journey into her past.
Mixing politics with personal meditations on fatherhood, mothers and their duties, and "the long dark night of junior high school," Holland gives readers a unique and sharp-eyed look at history as well as hard-earned insight into her own life. A shy, awkward girl with an overbearing stepfather and a bookworm mother, Holland surprises everyone by growing up into the confident, brainy, successful writer she is today. Tough, funny, and nostalgic yet unsentimental, When All the World Was Young is a true pleasure to read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Holland has enjoyed a prolific writing career 14 celebrated books, including Gentlemen's Blood, and essays in a wide range of periodicals and her autobiography is appropriately impressive. For it isn't just the idiosyncratic story of one brilliantly observant girl growing up in WWII-era Washington, D.C.; it's also an authentic history of that time, made enjoyable by its humor and honesty. Plucky little Barbara moves through the world with insatiable curiosity about gender roles ("Never was a woman between eighteen and eighty seen in a chair"), patriotic duties ("Why we were sent to the cafeteria for a pretend air raid but sent home for a real one is another mystery") and the unique cruelty of children ("Children sympathize only with animals"). Even as the neglected stepdaughter of an abusive patriarch, Holland never victimizes herself. Instead, she finds strength in her socialist grandmother's political rants, the library books she feverishly consumed as a youngster and the unlikely haven of a downtown department store where her mother installed window displays. Holland's deadpan chapter titles "The Chairs & Domestic Habits of Fathers Are Explored, & Nick Is Born" are just a taste of her unsentimental and witty approach; in the conclusion, she describes herself: "I am a writer. Not a famous writer, just a plain writer." Deathly afraid of ostentation, Holland sneaks in profundity, and the result is a delight.
