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An Idiosyncratic View of Contemporary America
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11812 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1994 |
2,146 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE
The Human Face of Poverty in America
Jonathan Freedman
New York: Atheneum, 1993
246 pp., $20.00
Karl Kraus, the nineteenth-century Austrian man of letters, reportedly once remarked, "A journalist is stimulated by a deadline; he writes worse when he has time." Kraus might have had persons such as Jonathan Freedman in mind. Freedman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing in 1987, spent three years traveling throughout America, researching and writing From Cradle to Grave. His time would have been better spent had he remained in San Diego writing editorials. Unfortunately, his mind-set is of more than passing interest now that we have in Washington an administration that, judging by its proposed health-care program, shares Freedman's intellectual enthusiasms.
Born in 1950, Freedman came of political age during the late 1960s, at the same time that Bill and Hillary Clinton were graduating from Georgetown University and Wellesley College. This was an era when American society, particularly the universities, was being ravaged by the New Left and its fellow travelers. Refugees from the 1960s, such as the Clintons, moderated their views once they sought to become part of the political and legal Establishment. Traces of the 1960s nevertheless remain and influence the attitudes of the sixties generation toward, among other things, the military, education, business, and race and gender relationships. As a journalist, Freedman has felt less pressure to modify his initial political and social impulses. This accounts for his book's seeming obliviousness to the vast corpus of scholarship during the past two decades on America's social and economic problems.
From Cradle to Grave is divided into eleven chapters roughly corresponding to the stages in an individual's life. Thus there are chapters on "Prenatal," "Infancy," "Early Childhood," "Adolescence," "Mid-Life," and "Retirement, Aging, and Dying." These chapters are tied together by Freedman's excessively lachrymose vision of recent American history. No longer is America the land of hope, opportunity, and progress. Instead, according to Freedman, "our economy falters, our frontiers shrink, our domestic infrastructure rusts, and our family structure breaks apart." The prospects for teenagers are particularly bleak. "Today's teenagers lack hope," Freedman writes. "Opportunities to find a job with a future are diminishing, while the economic and social
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