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 by  McWilliams

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Pub Date: April 21st, 1943
Publisher: Little, Brown

The author of in the Field and Ill Fates the Land is an excellent investigator. His books are a challenge to our social thinking. This new volume, dealing with one of the most pressing problems in America today, lacks the dramatic quality, the human interest, that characterized the other two volumes, and carried conviction and urge to do something about it, in spite of pretty solid, thoroughly documented reading. Perhaps this book, dealing as it does with related but diverse problems of all of the minorities. Indian, Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, Puerto, Rican even American attempts to broad a field. The facts are here: -- facts of conditions, social, economic, political, educational: facts of ghetto living conditions, oppression, discrimination -- all the things we charge our Axis foes with doing, we do ourselves, right within these enlightened U S A. He has told the faltering efforts made in the right direction -- and the backsteps produced and intensified by war conditions; he suggests, very tentatively, a few possible directives. But the book emerges as an important record for reference, but not the human interest document that he made of his other volumes. A background book -- but limited in its chances for popular reading.