The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans

by Hamilton Holt

Book Overview

Hamilton Holt, editor of The Independent, collected these touching autobiographies of ordinary people--new immigrants and sharecroppers, cooks and fishermen, women and men working in sweatshops, in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415901847
• ISBN13: 9780415901840
• Release Date: December 1989
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

More!

I hope this is one of many books just like this one! Heart-warming stories, you'll wish you'd known the person first-hand. I'm actually buying copies of this book for various friends that think the only history they need to know is on the History Channel! Well-written.

The threads that bind us as Americans

Each story is engaging and interesting. The stories are about urban and rural life. The most wonderful aspect of these acccounts are how much in common we have as human beings and immigrants. The same struggles and hardships are experienced regardless of ethnicity, an eye opening read.

You can't say enough nice about this book.....

I'm not one of the sort of people who falls often for heart warming. I'm too bitter, too jaded... too educated to be able to gush openly about kindly regard for many things. This book, though, deserves that kind of praise.As you could gather from the blurbs from magazines, this is a hundred year old book that seeks to illustrate the lives of typical, everyday (not to say uninteresting) Americans. The book is short; it's stories are realistic. Thus, it gives great insight into our collective 'ancestry': a voice to the long-dead.I'm inclined to think that every time I mentally want to destroy America, in this book, again, could be found renewed hope and exploration. In this book one can find the stories of Lithuanians who set out to cross the ocean, of free black women finding for the first time life in a segregated south, of Greek pushcart workers who end up with $50,000 in the bank. More or less, these are the voices that give our community continuity.... and, well, I'm starting to ramble and make little sense....Just read the book....

especially charming, direct, informative

This book should be more widely available. I find it full of the kind of detail about peoples' lives (in this case, immigrants to the United States) that are cogent, relevant, and delivered with considerable charm and lack of artifice. Everyone to whom I have given a copy of this book has raved about it.