Since Yesterday
“Mr. Allen’s shining service is to recall the things that have blurred equally with those that have stuck in memory. No one else does this sort of thing so well…Its basic merits are honesty, good nature, detachment without indifference, a keen eye for survival in news values. Somehow it conveys the impression of the American people telling their own story in autobiographical form.”
New York Times
In this panorama of the thirties, Frederick Lewis Allen combines an eye for the significant trivia of everyday existence with a facility for neatly dissecting the political monoliths of the era. Whether discussing the varieties of bathtub gin or elucidating Keynesian economics, Allen displays, in the words of Edward Weeks of The Atlantic, “a talent for terse and telling résumé which is the envy of any historian.”
Praise