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THE LOST CITY

DISCOVERING THE FORGOTTEN VIRTUES OF COMMUNITY IN THE CHICAGO OF THE 1950'S

In this evocative study, Ehrenhalt (The United States of Ambition, 1991) suggests that the era of '50s, for all its faults, has some vital lessons for today's society, which is frequently marked by the absence of a sense of community and responsibility. Although they had a bad press, many people, observes Ehrenhalt, look back to the Eisenhower years as a golden age, especially those who came through the Depression and WW II. Ehrenhalt evokes for us a mixed world in which choices were limited but commitment offered other rich rewards, a world in which Ernie Banks always played for the Cubs (he had to, but he was happy) and the Lennox Corporation ignored the bottom line by keeping its original factory open in Marshalltown, Iowa. Focusing on his native Chicago, the author takes us around the streets of a blue-collar Catholic parish, with its mom-and-pop grocery stores where credit was always available, and its hardworking nuns, usually from Detroit, who made the edifice of Catholic education possible. Then we move to the South Side ghetto of Bronzeville, where the Chicago Defender advocated against the Jim Crow system and controversial leaders like William Dawson and J.H. Jackson provided vital models of achievement and hope. Finally, we enter the split-level homes of Elmhurst, a white, middle-class, commuter suburb, where school authorities were concerned about chewing gum and people put their religious faith largely in the American way. Ehrenhalt carefully avoids nostalgic one-sidedness, and he points to factors that caused the revolution of the '60s. Arguing that, pace many conservatives, the true enemies of community are excessive trust in the free market and the cult of unlimited choice, he suggests that the coming generation may well be less leery of authority and stability. A powerfully written and astute analysis that challenges our preconceptions about the past and pessimism about the future.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1995

ISBN: 0-465-04192-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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