Russell Baker's Growing Up

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 book to show his own children, an

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s activist philosophy, while Russell, certainly finding success, nevertheless developed a more leisurely and inclusive sense of life than his younger sister. Another secondary character effectively portrayed by the author is his father. While the mother stands out as the bulwark, if not the tyrant of the family, the father's presence is more in the background, and brief, for he dies at an early age. The significance of the role of the father in the book and in Baker's life is that he was such a relatively weak character in comparison to Lucy. Whereas Lucy from the first page to the last appears to the reader to be a "mean old lady" (Baker 344) as Baker's wife Mimi puts it, the father is a quieter, kinder, less demanding character, albeit an alcoholic who did not take much of an active role in raising the children. His early death from diabetes increases the effect of the mother in the development of Baker. Perhaps most importantly, the father's more open-hearted perspective on life allowed Baker to develop the humor and acceptance which he used to develop his own personality, rather than following in his uptight mother's footsteps as his sister Doris clearly did. The Depression stands as the most powerful historical feature of t
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Approximate Word count = 1352
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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