This is about the 20th century in America, at home, around the radio, in front of the TV, at the dinner table, in the garage, behind the wheel, in the kitchen.It's about what we ate and what we listened to and watched.What we bought, what we wore, how we behaved and what we did for a living.Marta Hiatt does an amazing job of weaving nostalgic black white photos of people, places and things with her own beguiling narrative interspersed with quotes from ordinary people who lived during these times.The result is book that I literally could not put down.In fact I put aside some other books to read it.Remember doing the dishes with soap that wouldn't make suds in hard water? I do.The grease wouldn't get emulsified.It just got moved around.It took 10-year-old me hours to do the dishes from a big meal.Remember the washboard and the wringer that you were warned about getting your fingers caught in?Remember margarine, white like lard in a clear plastic bag, but with a little red ball that you broke and kneaded into the margarine to make it yellow?Remember corsets and garter belts and stockings that got runs in them?Leopold and Loeb, Al Capone, Patty Hearst, and Charlie Manson?Manual typewriters and the milk man?Or when the iceman did cometh and you put a square sign in the window with a chosen side up showing how much ice you needed?Popeye and spinach?Walking a mile for a Camel, and this ad on page 239: "No curative power is claimed for Philip Morris but--...An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure!...Call for Philip Morris"?The ad is from 1934.It is interesting how the tobacco companies projected their fears and revealed that even then they knew that cigarettes may cause disease.
Hiatt remembers all this and a lot more.You will find yourself turning the pages--which is to be expected since photos of those old ads, movie posters, people in quaint clothing, etc. are just so much fun to see; but what surprised me is just how readable the prose is.Hiatt's direct, unpretentious style and her knack for picking people to quote who are also straightforward make this one irresistible read.If there is any single theme that stands out, it would be the liberation of women, or truthfully, the partial liberation of women that has taken place most profoundly in the twentieth century. Hiatt does an excellent job of chronicling this momentous development and she points to some of the changes it has brought about.
The book is organized into chapters concentrating on various aspects of our lives, beginning with "Lifestyle," followed by "Sex and Social Mores," to "Household," through "That's Entertainment," "Fashion," and "Science and Technology," ending with Chapter Twelve, "A Potpourri of Changes."
Reading this is a bit like seeing the changes that have taken place in our lifetimes as in a newsreel (remember them?) sped up and vivid, perhaps like our lives passing before us...Irresistible book.
Product Description
A nostalgic journey back to a time of Model-T Fords, stay-at-home-moms, vinyl long-playing records, telegrams, radio days, strict rules of etiquette and manual typewriters. Here are the personal memories of the enormous changes that occurred in the twentieth century; a trip down memory lane for the older generation and, perhaps some surprising insights into the way life was, for those who are younger.
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