Gift from the Sea

Title: Gift from the Sea

Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Pages: 138

Genre: Essays, Inspirational

Grade: B

Synopsis: The book is basically a collection of essays that focus on Anne Morrow Lindbergh's (Wife of Charles Lindbergh) meditations on the different stages of life. She compares each stage of life to seashells that she found when meditating on a small island.

My Review: It took me a little while to get into this book and to understand what all her ramblings were about. I think that this is the type of book that would become more enjoyable the more that you read it. Probably one of the reasons that it was hard for me to get into the book was because much of the advice from the book didn't really apply to me.

From the Book: "(p. 26) For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!"

"(p. 83) I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it."