Russell’s only this big, she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it. Where’s Russell? she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. Louis Post-Dispatch Read moreĪT the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. “In lovely, haunting prose, he has told a story that is deeply in the American grain.” - The Washington Post Book World With poignant, humorous tales of powerful love, awkward sex, and courage in the face of adversity, Baker reveals how he helped his mother and family through the Great Depression by delivering papers and hustling subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post-a job which introduced him to bullies, mentors, and heroes who endured this national disaster with hard work and good cheer.Ĭalled “a treasure” by Anne Tyler and “a blessing” by Time magazine, this autobiography is a modern-day classic-“a wondrous book as funny and touching as Mark Twain’s” ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). Ranging from the backwoods of Virginia to a New Jersey commuter town to the city of Baltimore, this remarkable memoir recounts Russell Baker’s experience of growing up in pre–World War II America, before he went on to a celebrated career in journalism. One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” The Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir about coming of age in America between the world wars: “So warm, so likable and so disarmingly funny” ( The New York Times).

Growing Up by Russell Baker