British journalist Boggan delivers a “Where’s George?”–inspired debut examining the varied paths paper money can take and the hands it passes through.
Taking a cue from an ill-fated newspaper piece he was assigned by the Guardian, the author decided to follow a $10 bill for 30 days and nights, pushing off in 2010 near Lebanon, Kan. (pop. 218). Unpaid and driven by curiosity alone, the inquisitive author put the ten-spot in the welcoming hands of deer-hunting lodge owner and first-aid responder Rick Chapin, tracking its 3,300-mile journey from the supermarket where the Chapins purchased lunch. Each consumer, in turn, spent the money and told Boggan their story, many still at the mercy of a struggling American economy. After contact with Ernie, a lifelong Lebanon farmer who lamented that crop machines have predominantly replaced human effort, the bill passed to a truck stop, where a traveling single mother and her son braved the roads together. The action sputters some in Hot Springs, Ark., but then revives as the money met a Chicago-based post-recession investment banker fearful of his increasingly embittered, angry older clientele and a Vietnam veteran still nursing painful war wounds. These poignant profiles give the book its heart and personify the reality of a collapsed economy. Boggan’s eye-opening journey ends at the expansive home of a former auto maintenance welder in Detroit who remains optimistic about the future of the American automobile industry.
A fun, multifaceted travelogue.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-908526-21-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Union Books/Aurum
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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