2009, ISBN: 9780393072259

Hardcover

Indianapolis - New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company - A Subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., 1977. First Edition . Hard Back. Near Fine/Very Good. 5 3/4" x 8 1/2. Torre, Vi… More...

Indianapolis - New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company - A Subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., 1977. First Edition . Hard Back. Near Fine/Very Good. 5 3/4" x 8 1/2. Torre, Vincent - Design. 340 Pages. Previous owner's name on front endpaper. No other marks or stamps to this otherwise as new book with flawless interior text pages. Dust jacket has unclipped price 7.95 and a full-length crease. What happens to the people when a factory closes up and moves away? What happens to the community? What happens to the families of the men who lose their jobs? How does it affect you? Consider Henry Burns, fork-lift operator at Baker Company for twenty-five years, looking forward to retirement. One day the paralyzing news breaks: Baker Plant is being closed down. Now he is not only faced with the frustrating need to find new employment in late middle age, but he will lose his pension by a margin of months. Otto Mueller, a salaried employee in a responsible position, expected better treatment. After devoting thirty-three and a half years to Baker Company, he was not permitted to work a crucial three months longer, even without pay, at another branch. He, too, lost his pension. An extension of only three weeks would have saved him four thousand dollars in taxes. This was denied him also. Every year thousands of workers have their jobs and their futures plucked from them by dispassionate corporate decisions to relocate. The effects on employees, particularly the middle-aged, is devastating. This book is an indictment of society's indifference to the influence of social and economic anxieties on the mental and physical health of its members. Fully 50% of the men included in the Baker Company study were beset by ulcers, arthritis, hypertension requiring hospitalization, alcoholism, depression requiring medical help precipitated by the Baker closing. Of Baker's seven salesmen, three died during closing. This book is a cogent sociological study. It is also a skillful, compassionate narrative more readable than many novels., The Bobbs-Merrill Company - A Subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., 1977, 3.5, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Hardcover. New/New. Only yesterday the Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into the hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that the calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet the recent economic meltdown has once again rivet the world's attention on the 1930s. Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called "one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature," explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein's fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of the more exuberant side of the era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and the lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing the influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how the arts were then so integral to the fabric of American society. While any lover of American literature knows Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Dickstein also reclaims the lives of other novelists whose work offers enduring insights. Nathanael West saw Los Angeles as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longing that exposed the pinched and disappointed lives of ordinary people, while Erskine Caldwell, his books Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre festooned with lurid covers, provided the most graphic portrayal of rural destitution in the 1930s. Dickstein also immerses us in the visions of Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Roth, only lagter recognized for their literary masterpieces. Just as Dickstein radically transforms our understanding of Depression literature, he explodes the prevailing myths that 1930s musicals and movies were merely escapist. Whether describing the undertone of sadness that lurks just below the surface of Cole Porter's bubbly world or stressing the darker side of Frank Capra's wildly popular films, he shows how they delivered a catharsis of pain and an evangel of hope. Dickstein suggests that the tragic and comic worlds of Broadway and Hollywood preserved a radiance and energy that became a bastion against social suffering. DANCING IN THE DARK describes how FDR's administration recognized the critical role that the arts could play in enabling "the helpless to become hopeful, the victims to become agents." Along with the SPA, the photography unit of the FSA represented a historic partnership between government and art, and the photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, created the defining look of the period. The symbolic end to this cultural flowering came finally with the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, a collective event that presented a vision of the future as a utopia of streamlined modernity and, at long last, consumer abundance. Retrieving the stories of an entire generation of performers and writers, DANCING N THE DARK shows how a rich, panoramic culture both exposed and helped alleviate the national trauma. This luminous work is a monumental study of one of America's most remarkable artistic periods. W.W. Norton, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2009 THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK., W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, 6<