Even at the time, many counseled patience and denounced government aid as socialistic, but few readers of this gripping,...
Historian Golay (The Tide of Empire: America’s March to the Pacific, 2003, etc.) has mined the thousands of letters between Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickock (1893–1968) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), as well as Hickok’s reports, to present an unexpectedly horrific picture of America during a terrible time.
Hired by the incoming Franklin Roosevelt administration in 1933, Hickok traveled the nation to report on conditions, leaving behind “an incomparable narrative record…of America in the depths of the Great Depression.” Although a sophisticated reporter, she was appalled. Cities seemed devastated; storefronts were empty; factories were abandoned or barely operating; farmers continued to be hopelessly in debt, destroying crops they could only sell at a loss. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration encouraged unions, but even their victories could not create jobs. Usually, but not always, charities performed magnificently, until they ran out of money. Most victims were apathetic, but there was plenty of violence, especially in mines and rural areas. Conservatives saw communists behind the protests, and there was no shortage of conviction that American capitalism had failed and that revolution was imminent. The voluminous Hickock-Roosevelt correspondence also reveals a passionate friendship whose romantic possibilities have not escaped historians. Golay does not shy away from that material but keeps his focus on the awfulness of the Depression. Those who yearn for an America of low taxes, unfettered free enterprise, no entitlements, and where charities look after the unfortunate will discover that those were the conditions in 1933.
Even at the time, many counseled patience and denounced government aid as socialistic, but few readers of this gripping, painful account of third-world–level poverty and despair will agree that it is the natural order.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9601-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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