Reviews

Growing Up with Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream by Carole Kismaric

kmatthe2's review

2.0

An interesting book, but probably not because of what the authors intended. This discussion of the classic reading primers is more of a celebratory hagiography than a critical examination. Because of that, many of the reading series' problems are unintentionally replicated in this book. While about 5 pages are devoted to the ways in which this white, middle-class, hetereonormative reader didn't necessarily reflect all Americans' experience, the rest of the book relies on and reinforces reductive ideas of the "American Dream" that (probably) led to Dick and Jane's demise. It will be useful to me as I discuss reading and African American citizenship in the 1950s and 1960s.