jeff_wilder78's Full Review: Russell Baker - Growing Up
One evening when I was eleven I brought home a short "composition" on my summer vacation which the teacher had graded with an A. Reading it with her own schoolteacher's eye, my mother agreed that it was top drawer seventh grade prose and complimented me. Nothing mores was said. But a new idea had taken root in her mind. Halfway through dinner she interrupted the conversation.
"Buddy", she said, "maybe you could be a writer".-Russell Baker from Growing Up
It is as a tribute to his mother that Russell Baker, one of America's leading wordsmiths and humorists, wrote Growing Up, his 1982 account of doing just that during the depression. The memoir one him his second Pulitzer Prize (his first he won 4 years prior for his New York Times "Observer" Column). The book itself is very well-written (as is pretty much everything Baker's ever done) and has dashes of humor throughout it. Yet overall. the book ranks as a touching tribute to the mama who raised him, pushed him when he needed pushing and ultimately encouraged him to make something of himself.
"Lord how I hated those words", Baker writes at the conclusion of chapter 1 of Growing up, referring of course to "make something of yourself". Young Russell wasn't a bad boy per se. He was a decent young man who had the same habit that many people of 7-8 (end often higher in many cases) have: laziness. Of course, his mother Lucy Elizabeth did not approve of this at all. She was determined that her son was going to get on the path to success. Growing Up is the story of how she and several other influences in young Russell's life helped steer him that way.
The other influences include his younger sister Doris, his Uncle Harold, his Aunt Pat and his 12th grade high school English teacher Mr. Fleagle. All of them give him advice and affection for this is not the time to be loafing around. This is America in the 1930s, the height of the Great Depression.
Baker's writing vividly brings the era to life. He shows how people struggled to make enough money to subsist on and how this affected everyone, especially the people in his family. And it was especially hard on Baker's family, for his father died when he was 5 years old. This resulted in his mother and sister moving from Virginia to Belleville New Jersey (where young Russell experienced his first taste of journalism work as a magazine salesman at eight years old) and finally Baltimore. We are shown Baker going to John's Hopkins University to major in Journalism, accompnay him through service in the Navy and watch as he meets his first wife and gets started on the path towards success in the wordsmithing business.
We get many different tidbits of life in early-to-mid 20th century America. We watch as Russell's Aunt and Uncle quarrel over the hanging of a re-elect Herbert Hoover poster and see them compromise when the aunt goes out to get a Roosevelt poster. We see Uncle Harold introduce Russell to the writing of HL Mencken. We see Russell in a college writing course attempting to write like Hemingway.
Through it all, the one constant throughout the journey is Lucy Elizabeth. She's an ever presence throughout the book, always there to cheer Russell on, to pray for him when he needs it. Unfortunately, we also see old age take over her life and her mind and the final moments of the book as she succumbs to death and can't even remember her own son are positively heartbreaking.
The book is written very well and although the tone is more heavy-handed than what you would often find in Baker's sardonically humorous column, there are still moments of humor scattered throughout the book.
I hereby dedicate this review to my mother Christina Marie Wilder who died on May 3 2001. I love you mom and I miss you. Thank you for pushing me and encouraging me much the same way Lucy Elizabeth did.
This review is part of the Mother's Day W/O hosted by Dionne25. To read reviews by other participants, check out her profile page.
This Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography is Russell Baker's unforgettable story of growing up in America between the world wars. It is the story of a...More at HotBookSale
This is Russell Baker s story of growing up in America between the world wars--in the backwoods mountains of Virginia, in a New Jersey commuter town, ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.