Published by K & C Research Assistance, Inc.
Copyright © K & C Research Assistance, Inc., 1996
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages this publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means withoutthe publisher's prior consent.
If you have any questions about this report, or if you would like us to write custom research for you, please contact our customer service department at 1-800-501-6465.
Russell Baker's Growing Up should be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for both content and style. Baker has written a work which humanely and vividly portrays the coming-of-age of a young man at in an era crucial to the development of the United States as a modern nation---the era of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Baker's book is valuable for its entertainment value, its humor, its humanity, its poignancy, and for its masterful and seemingly effortless blending of the personal and the historical. We come to know not only this young man and his family, but also the spirit of the nation in this turbulent time.
Baker is a well-respected journalist who in this book looks back over his childhood and young manhood in order to honor that childhood, his family, and the courage and steadfastness of America between the two world wars. It covers not only the urban realm with which the adult Baker is familiar and which he covers today with wit and insight, but also the mountain life of Virginia and a New Jersey commuter town. Although it does deal with a period in American history which brings up fears of every sort (war, poverty, hunger, rootlessness), the book faces these fears and transcends them. The reader emerging from this book will feel a deeper and warmer connection, a greater appreciation for not only the author and his family, but for the country which served as a crucible for their development.
As Baker declares, he wants in this b...