Depression Books

Brian has captured a view of the Great Depression that actually made me feel like I had lived through it. He has an amazing grasp of what happened back then, the lifestyles of those affected, and even the way people thought. I was thoroughly enthralled with the book and I hope he writes more.

Originally released in UK as NoonDay Demon Anatomy of Depression re-released as the Atlas of Depression Amazon.co.uk Review
"Breakdowns are preposterous" writes Andrew Solomon in his wide-ranging and illuminating study, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression. With the current vogue for self-help books, medication doled out at the drop of a hat, and therapy-speak, it would seem that depression is a modern phenomenon, a reaction to the stresses of a consumerist, high-achieving world. Yet as Solomon explains, the word " depression" was "first used in English to describe low spirits in 1660"; prior to this time, the vagaries of the unquiet mind were termed "melancholia". Bravely cataloguing his own series of depressive episodes, Solomon attempts to go to the roots of the illness--for an illness it is, and has to be treated as such--by interviewing fellow sufferers, delving back into history ("the history of depression in the West is closely tied to the history of Western thought")--analysing suicide, addictions, treatments, and depression's underlying causes, from politics to poverty. At the heart of this informed, compassionate book lies Solomon's own story--an established writer with seemingly everything going for him, he succumbed to a series of breakdowns in his 31st year, and eventually rallied with the support of his father, other family members and friends, a good therapist and a shopping list of medications, which he still takes daily. Out of his depression emerged qualities of self he never knew existed, and a desire to "find and cling to the reasons for living". Solomon's dark night of the soul, on a par with Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness is a significant and important chronicle. Between 10 and 15 per cent of Americans and up to 6 million people in the UK experience depression; books like The Noonday Demon might just broaden our understanding of it. --Catherine Taylor --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. The Noonday Demon

A wonderful nostalgic look back to the hardships of settling in the Dakotas to the hardship of battle in the Pacific during WWII. Very telling of life and history.

"Since graduating from Brooklyn College in 1936, Eli Jaffe has written four novels, a score of short stories, one-act and full length plays,but he considers Oklahoma Odyssey his major work. This memoir relates his experience in Dust Bowl/Depression Oklahoma (1938-1941) as a volunteer for the Workers Allicance, a group of unemployed oil field workers and dispossessed farm folk."

My children and I loved the story, but when we got to the last page we really did listen in our minds what each of the instruments sounded like both individually and as a bad playing a song. We talked about the book and story long after we brought it back to the library.
Ten years later as we are sitting at the table talking, the book came up again! So I called the library we got it from and found the title. Now once again we are enjoying it together along with our grandchildren children.

All proceeds from will goto the humane society and dogs for seniors programs so please show your support! Its a great short story about a man who lost his wife and found comfort and friendship in a stray dog.

A wonderful love story that took place in the early years of Pittsburgh. Very interesting and a fast read, you don't want to put it down. Since I live in Pittsburgh I really enjoyed the history and landmarks mentioned in the book. Also, reading about the CCC which I just recently learned of was very interesting. The story didn't turn out the way I would have hoped but then life never does. What a great tribute Margaret Frances Soboslay pays to her parents, especially her beaautiful Mom. Loved it and hope she writes more.

For fifty-eight days in the summer of 1934, temperatures in the High Plains exceeded 100 degrees, with almost no rain. In the Texas Panhandle near Dalhart, as well as in other High Plains states, a black blizzard of dust turned day into night. The wind raged endlessly, blowing the Texas top soil into Oklahoma, where it mixed with the red Oklahoma soil, and blew into Arkansas and Kansas and Colorado. It destroyed car engines, choked cattle to death, buried houses under mountains of sand. People got sick with respiratory illnesses, "dust pneumonia" they called it. Traffic stopped. Schools and businesses closed. Ruined farms were abandoned.

Those that made it through 1934, did not survive in 1936 when the dust storms returned, this time accompanied by a plague of grasshoppers that devoured their dryland crops. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and those people already living on the edge fell off the precipice.

"On the Dirty Plate Trail" is about the Great Migration that ensued as a result of the Dust Bowl. The title refers to Highway 99, which took the refugees from peas in California's Imperial Valley to cotton in the San Joaquin Valley to peaches and prunes in the Sacramento Valley as farmers without farms suddenly became migrant workers. They were called Okies no matter which state they hailed from, and they were exploited by labor contractors, abused by locals, and blamed by society for their own troubles. They lived in squatters camps, or shacks rented to them by the farm bosses, or if they were lucky, in tent cities provided by the Farm Security Administration. Conditions were often deplorable, and many died of disease, in childbirth or by accident.

In 1929, the Babb sisters, Sanora and Dorothy, had come to California from Kansas. It was because of their farmer's daughters background that they were accepted as insiders by the refugees. While visiting the camps, Sanora made "field notes" intended for use in the Dust Bowl novel she was writing, and Dorothy snapped pictures with her camera.

Years later, Dorothy's well-documented photographs were found in a brown paper sack and given by relatives to Douglas Wixson, who matched the photographs with Sanora's field notes to create this stunning volume. The photographs alone are worth the price. These candid images unveil the migrant story of hunger and misery, laughter and music, mud and squalor, pride and picket lines.

"Migration is as old as humankind and as recent as today," says Douglas Wixson, noting in his Preface that as he finished the final draft of this book, refugees from Hurricane Katrina were pouring from flood-stricken New Orleans and other devastated cities on the Gulf Coast, "like shifting currents of water ... separate, little noticed, yet indispensable to our economy."

This book covers all aspects of mental health work after 9/11. Written by over 100 people involved in some way with mental health work related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the first-hand accounts are real, believable, and readable. One takes away not only ideas for future work but perhaps more important, a sense of the despair and devastation of both the victims and the mental health workers involved. It is important reading for all mental health workers and the most comprehensive book of its kind in publication.

Lorena Hickok, special investigator for Harry Hopkins, traveled the country reporting on the human dimension of life during the Depression, while at the same time evaluating the impact of New Deal policies and programs and support for Roosevelt. Her reports read like letters, honest and open, down to earth. She talked to governors, tenant farmers, labor leaders, children working in the fields, social workers, down and out transients, former press colleagues, people on the edge of survival - and everyone in between. Hickok struggles with issues of white collar workers on relief vs the working class and chronically poor. Her ignorance on race issues is apparent when visiting the South and Southwest, but reading these reports is also instructive on attitudes of the times. I picked up this book because I was interested in the life of Lorena Hickok, who was the AP's highest paid female reporter before taking the job with Hopkins, and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. What I got was a window into her world, but much more than that. Highly recommended for those interested in the US in the 1930s, the Depression years, and for fans of Hick.