Take a photo of a barcode or cover
still65 's review for:
Cotton Tenants: Three Families
by James Agee
This short but haunting read was originally an article James Agee had written in 1936 as an assignment for Fortune Magazine.
He spent an entire summer in Moundsville, Alabama (20 something miles south of Tuscaloosa) mostly visiting with three sharecropper families.
Agee had a lot to crab about in his article -the living conditions of the sharecroppers -or, as they preferred to call themselves "tenant farmers". He raised holy hell with the editors of Fortune claiming that these families and others like them all over the South deserved more than a mere exploitative piece written on their pitiful lives and unhealthy living conditions.
That article never saw print until the publication of this book earlier this year.
It would however form the basis for Agee's 1941 masterpiece [b:Let Us Now Praise Famous Men|243360|Let Us Now Praise Famous Men|James Agee|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348861035s/243360.jpg|1204501].
Agee writes at times in a tone that condescends or seems to mock the men who head the three families described in COTTON TENANTS.
He opines on children barely out of puberty and what he sees as their "precocious sexuality" more than once. In fact it becomes tiresome and raises more questions about Agee than it does the impoverished children.
I found his obsessing on a perception of a child's "sexuality" a little unsettling, but hell - call me a prude.
I'm going out of my way here to criticize what are minor imperfections in what is in total the work of a champion idealist burdened with the noblest of intentions: to issue a scathing indictment of the worst in the privileged class which is their readiness to exploit the weak, the powerless - the poor.
He spent an entire summer in Moundsville, Alabama (20 something miles south of Tuscaloosa) mostly visiting with three sharecropper families.
Agee had a lot to crab about in his article -the living conditions of the sharecroppers -or, as they preferred to call themselves "tenant farmers". He raised holy hell with the editors of Fortune claiming that these families and others like them all over the South deserved more than a mere exploitative piece written on their pitiful lives and unhealthy living conditions.
That article never saw print until the publication of this book earlier this year.
It would however form the basis for Agee's 1941 masterpiece [b:Let Us Now Praise Famous Men|243360|Let Us Now Praise Famous Men|James Agee|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348861035s/243360.jpg|1204501].
Agee writes at times in a tone that condescends or seems to mock the men who head the three families described in COTTON TENANTS.
He opines on children barely out of puberty and what he sees as their "precocious sexuality" more than once. In fact it becomes tiresome and raises more questions about Agee than it does the impoverished children.
I found his obsessing on a perception of a child's "sexuality" a little unsettling, but hell - call me a prude.
I'm going out of my way here to criticize what are minor imperfections in what is in total the work of a champion idealist burdened with the noblest of intentions: to issue a scathing indictment of the worst in the privileged class which is their readiness to exploit the weak, the powerless - the poor.