Showing posts with label cold war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cold war. Show all posts

Another Time Another Place Review

Another Time Another Place
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Another Time Another Place? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Another Time Another Place. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Another Time Another Place ReviewFor anyone who lived in or near Brooklyn's Brownsville section at any time prior to the early 1960s, this book is sheer nostalgia. By having interviewed a substantial number of people (many of whom now live in Florida), the authors do an outstanding job of conveying the flavor of "the old neighborhood" in days gone by. At the end of the book there's a series of interviews with Brownsville celebrities, that is people who went on to become nationally famous, including Steve Lawrence and "Grandpa Munster" Al Lewis.
The authors clearly convey a picture of Brownsville in its heyday as a nuturing neighborhood and the experience of having grown up there as not at all unlike my vision of small-town America--a place where people knew and cared about one another.
Perhaps small-town America is still like that. However, one would be hard presssed to find an urban neighborhood that could be called nurturing anywhere in America today.
I only wish the authors had told us more about the history of Brownsville all the way up to the present time and why the neighborhood changed so drastically, but perhaps that was beyond their purpose. Still one can't help but wonder what became of the elderly people who had lived there all or most of their lives and were "left behind" through no fault of their own when the area turned into a crime-ridden slum.Another Time Another Place OverviewThe Brownsville/East New York neighborhood of the 1930's, 40's and 50's is now but an almost faded memory, a "time warp" as it were. Today it is a neighborhood that has been eviscerated and exists only as a geographic locale. Through the collective memories of the famous and the not-so-famous, Jerry Chatanow and Bernie Schwartz have elicited and chronicled a treasure trove of anecdotes and remembrances that bring back to life a once vibrant and exhilarating neighborhood. The authors vividly transport the reader back to a bygone era of street games, egg creams, mello rolls and knishes, patriotism at the home front, plush movie palaces, the Dodgers, the Knicks, boxing venues, old time radio and the neighborhood settlement houses with its open doors waiting to welcome the teeming masses. Anyone from small town or big city who was ever enriched by the nurturing warmth, the loyalties and camaraderie of a "neighborhood" will enjoy this major contribution to the oral history of America. This is a story told within the context of this country's transformation from "The Great Depression" to World War Two to "Baby Boomer" prosperity. The authors were both observers of and participants in what in retrospect proved to be a triumphant generation.

Want to learn more information about Another Time Another Place?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 Review

Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 ReviewThis book recreates the "immigrant" experience of peasant workers in Moscow during the first two Five Year Plans, the era of the "Great Break." Here was laid the foundations of the Soviet system as we came to know and love it for the next sixty years.
As alluded, the story of peasant migrants come to the big city reminds me strongly of immigrants who came to New York, Chicago, and other big industrial US cities a generation before. The same dislocation, the same clannishness, the same rivalries between the established and the greenhorn. What also emerges is the rise of Stalin as political boss and Stalinism as a Russian variant of big-city bossism. The social base - immigrants and their upwardly-mobile offspring - was strikingly identical and goes far to explain Stalinism as a social phenomena, beyond the "cult of personality" or ideological wrangles with right or left party opponents.
At one crucial statement I do disagree with Professor Hoffmann, when he states on page 106 that "The Soviet industrial system, with its undisciplined worforce, weakened management, and Party and police interference, never achieved rationalized and routinized production." These same handicaps plagued American industry some 30 years before, but were overcome by expanding industry and the education and adaption of the workforce. As Stephen Kotkin shows in "Magnetic Mountain," tracing this same Stalinist pattern in the creation of the Magnitogortsk Complex, Stalinism hammered out a very credible industrial civilization; while Michael Burawoy's work experience in socialist Hungary showed a "rationalized and routinized production" regime equal to that of American factories where he'd earlier worked.
But altogether a useful contribution to the school of "Stalinist studies."Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 OverviewDuring the 1930's, 23 million peasants left their villages and moved to Soviet cities, where they comprised almost half the urban population and more than half the nation's industrial workers.Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David L. Hoffmann shows how this massive migration to the cities--an influx unprecedented in world history--had major consequences for the nature of the Soviet system and the character of Russian society even today.Hoffmann focuses on events in Moscow between the launching of the industrialization drive in 1929 and the outbreak of war in 1941.He reconstructs the attempts of Party leaders to reshape the social identity and behavior of the millions of newly urbanized workers, who appeared to offer a broad base of support for the socialist regime.The former peasants, however, had brought with them their own forms of cultural expression, social organization, work habits, and attitudes toward authority.Hoffmann demonstrates that Moscow's new inhabitants established social identities and understandings of the world very different from those prescribed by Soviet authorities.Their refusal to conform to the authorities' model of a loyal proletariat thwarted Party efforts to construct a social and political order consistent with Bolshevik ideology.The conservative and coercive policies that Party leaders adopted in response, he argues, contributed to the Soviet Union's emergence as an authoritarian welfare state.

Want to learn more information about Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...