What Do I Read Next?
In Golden Boy, Joe abandons his aspirations of becoming a musician to enter the harsh realm of boxing. Nowadays, violence in boxing sometimes spills over beyond the ring, as seen in the case of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, who is now a former convict. In Blood Season: Mike Tyson and the World of Boxing (1996), Phil Berger, who once covered boxing for the New York Times, uses Tyson’s violent history to explore the current landscape of boxing. Berger’s book offers an honest view of the boxers, promoters, and businessmen who sustain the industry today.
After recent changes to the welfare system, millions were pushed to accept unskilled jobs. To investigate whether women could survive on such low wages, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich left her middle-class lifestyle to experience their struggles firsthand. Her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, details her efforts to find various low-paying jobs, secure housing, and above all, make ends meet.
In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, first published in 1954, a group of schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island during World War II must learn to survive without adult supervision or modern conveniences. As they struggle to adapt, many of the boys revert to their basic instincts, leading to violent and deadly outcomes.
Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, introduced in 1959, portrays an African-American family in urban Chicago fighting to escape poverty. Tensions arise within the family and from society when they plan to use the insurance money from their deceased father to purchase a house in a predominantly white neighborhood. Hansberry was the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
Odets drew inspiration from the 1934 New York City cab strike for his one-act play Waiting for Lefty (1935). In the play, the taxi drivers’ union convenes in a meeting hall to consider whether to strike, sharing their stories of severe poverty in the process. A fast-paced play, it is often regarded by critics as Odets’s most impassioned work.
In Odets’s play The Big Knife (1949), Charlie Castle, a movie actor, desperately tries to escape the corruption of Hollywood and return to his past life in New York theater. However, being entrenched in the Hollywood system, Castle finds that leaving is not always straightforward.
Mr. Bonaparte’s friend, Mr. Carp, is a pessimist who frequently cites the ideas of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Many of Schopenhauer’s central ideas are encapsulated in his two-volume collection, The World as Will and Idea, first published in Germany in 1819.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) tells the story of the Joad family, who struggle to hold onto their dignity amid severe poverty during the Great Depression. Although they leave their home in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl for California, lured by promises of a better life, their hardships only intensify. Steinbeck's novel serves as a poignant social protest, capturing the despair felt by numerous American families during this era.
Published in 1970, Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression offers a vivid chronicle of the 1930s through the personal stories of those who experienced it. Over thirty years, Terkel conducted interviews with a diverse group of Americans to collect these firsthand accounts. His interviewees ranged from young to old, and included politicians, gangsters, and sharecroppers.
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