books review (history of US)

Books Review

Each period of U .S . history presents an opportunity to think about the history of working class and racial discrimination . Having yet to develop thorough , critical , and radical interpretations of the civil rights struggle , historians have tended to share a sympathetic attitude toward the quest for civil rights . They also lack the advantage recently gained by diplomatic historians with the end of the cold war , and they cannot , and do not want to , declare the straggle to be over ' because racial discord has not ended and racial justice has not

been achieved Historians will , therefore , continue to write about an ongoing movement for equal rights in which their advocacy and support seem to them important to the movement 's success . Surveys of the literature by Upton Sinclair and Anne Moody have already made important contributions in identifying persistent problems . For these , direct personal participation preceded writing about the movements

Unlike Sinclair 's The Jungle , Moody 's Coming of Age in Mississippi is compelling autobiographical narratives in the African American literary tradition . In a voice that is as subtle as it is insistent , as unpretentious as it is romising , Moody maps her coming of age in Mississippi during the repressive 1940s and 1950s and the turbulent early years of the 1960s . Yet Moody 's narrative is more than a poignant personal testimony it is an immensely valuable cultural document that offers an insightful view of life in Mississippi during the middle decades of the twentieth century and the carefully orchestrated resistance to that way of life that the civil rights movement initiated during the 1960s

The beautiful s of Moody 's Coming of Age in Mississippi are all very good . They served a purpose and served it well . Coming of Age in Mississippi was a great book . It is lively and warm . It is written with pain and blood and groans and tears . It says not what man should be , but what man is forced to be in our world . It presents not what our country should be , but it describes what our country really is , the residence of pressure and unfairness , a nightmare of suffering , an inferno hell , a jungle of wild brutes

But I consider that The Jungle , which has beautiful theories , is even a greater book . It was the novel , which was responsible for the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act . In 1906 , Sinclair 's The Jungle catapulted him into almost-immediate fame . The Jungle became a best-seller in many languages and actually made Sinclair 's name known all over the world The New York Evening World announced : Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide fame won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair (Foner 89

The Jungle produced big public excitement . I think that Upton Sinclair was emotionally involved in the creating of The Jungle . Though Upton Sinclair 's The Jungle concentrates more on working-class struggle than...