MADELEINE’S WORLD
Chosen by Slate Magazine as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years
What might it feel like to be six months old? To have only recently discovered that your hands are your own and that not all round things are breasts? Or to be two years old, and to wonder what the moon is, and whether it’s farther away than airplanes or the flies on the ceiling? What might be the feeling that you can imagine something that isn’t true? That your parents are fallible? That things die, and so will you?
That you are a person with a history.
Sharply observed, funny, irreverent and at times profoundly disconcerting, Madeleine’s World tracks the rising arc of a new mind. Along the way, it records achievements more monumental and disillusionments more devastating than in a run of adult biographies. What emerges is a portrait of growing consciousness in action, a universal voyage whose every revelation and frustration is captured with stunning detail and intimacy.
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Praise for Madeleine’s World
“Even nonparents will be fascinated by Madeleine’s World for the ways it delves deep into the thought patterns and imaginative leaps readers half-remember from their own childhoods; for parents, the book—in its insistence that to pay attention is to love—can be almost unbearably moving.”
—Slate, “The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years”
“Hall stuns with his observational powers and emotional truth . . . [and] succeeds dazzingly at making his daughter and the toddler sensibility come alive.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“This wonderful ‘biography’ of a baby manages to avoid almost every cliché in the child-development handbook. Using fresh, revealing details, novelist Hall keeps his wits—and wit—about him . . . An enthralling journey into a baby’s dramatic world.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A delightful, resonant account of a journey we have all taken but, for the most part, forgotten . . . Hall recreates the gains and losses of growing up in all their bittersweet glory . . . By investing Madeleine’s tiny, often comic struggles with so much meaning, Hall in turn confers an enormous dignity on all adults who undertake the humble, relentless task of being there for small children.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Hall brims with imaginative and convincing interpretations of his daughter’s every eye-movement from birth onwards, his antennae sharpened—but never biased—by love . . . One re-experiences the world through Madeleine’s eyes, and her closing words about death are so full of human hope I cried.”
—The Observer (London)
Also by Brian Hall
