[lit-ideas] Re: losers
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 19:37:28 EST
Hi,
<sigh> Sorry about that!!
Here is what I had sent regarding the Losing Book:
Hi,
We have the book at 'book meeting' this month. (that's when we get to see
the new books and decide whether or not to order them for our
branches/departments/etc.) I now have a request for it via our ILL
department.
Here are a couple of other reviews:
It's a most familiar refrain of American life: work hard and prosper. That
the dream of triumphant prosperity so consistently and perplexingly eludes so
many, despite heroic effort and toil, is, alas, also familiar. Hardly
surprising, argues Carnegie Mellon historian Sandage: it turns out that
Americans
are much less Andrew Carnegie and more Willy Loman. Why? In the early days of
the republic, Protestant predestination and the uniquely democratic promise of
reward based on a meritocracy of effort and talent unleashed the dynamic but
often unfocused energies of untold numbers of self-styled frontier
entrepreneurs. By the 19th century, the myth of the self-made man had become a
test of
identity and self-worth. A few succeeded beyond their wildest expectations
but, says Sandage, most Americans faced unexpected and heartbreaking ruin.
Sandage has done an admirable job of culling diaries and letters to tell their
stories. Most compelling are the "begging letters" written by women to
outstanding capitalists on behalf of their ruined husbands. Regrettably, these
individual snapshots fail to cohere into a fully comprehensive portrait of the
personal and social psychology of failure. That failure diminished a man is
hardly revelatory, nor does it constitute the level of specific historical
analysis one expects. 30 b&w photos; 30 b&w illus. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed
Business Information. Appeared in: Publishers Weekly, Nov 01, 2004 (c)
Copyright
2004, Cahners Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
In his first book, Sandage (history, Carnegie Mellon) concentrates on "the
hidden history of pessimism in a culture of optimism" that was 19th-century
America. This was the era when capitalism captivated much of the nation's
consciousness, in some cases arguably for the better or, as the author
emphasizes
here, for the worse. To show this underside of the American dream, Sandage
plumbs the surprisingly rich sources of letters, diaries, business records,
credit agency reports, and the intriguing "begging letters" for financial
assistance sent to successful men. He thereby adds to the limited, but
growing,
offerings in the field of failure studies represented by Edward Balleisen's
Navigating Failure (2001) and Bruce Mann's Republic of Debtors (2002). The
author
movingly describes the emotional toll that economic collapse exacted on the
self-worth of men in that patriarchal age. He delineates general changes over
time with financial default moving from an incident to an identity. This
finely crafted and challenging treatise, enhanced by illustrations, would make
a
substantive contribution to academic libraries seeking to develop their
gender studies as well as intellectual and cultural history
collections.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2004 Reed
Business
Information. Appeared in: Library Journal, Oct 01, 2004 (c) Copyright 2004,
Cahners
Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
On the request list,
Marlena in Missouri
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
