The Boy Who Looked Like Shirley Temple

By Bill Mahan

Billy and his family leave their home for the greener pastures of California in the 1930s, hoping for better times there. They find a place to rent in Culver City and are down to just a few dollars. The dad is a hopeless hypochondriac and the mom finds a job only to have her boss skip town without paying her for two weeks of work. Looks like it's up to the two kids to support the family, which they manage to do pretty well by stealing lima beans from a nearby farm and selling them on the street. The customers are lining up for the discount beans but then the mom finds out what her two kids have been doing and puts a stop to it, despite the fact that the family is on the verge of being evicted from their crummy little house. But then cute little Billy gets discovered by Hollywood and things start to look up...maybe.

This was a fun and enjoyable read, a great trip back to a time that makes our current economic struggles look like child's play. It was a real hand-to-mouth existence but Billy and his older sister managed to keep the family going despite their parents' incompetence. I really enjoyed this very amusing story of a Depression-era family coping with hard times.

Potatoes Are Cheaper

By Max Shulman

It's 1936, the heart of the Depression, and two young men, Morris Katz and his cousin have hit on a way out of poverty to a better life. They'll enroll in college and find rich, homely Jewish girls and woo them and marry them.
They get the necessary cash together for the first semester and they are off and running. Morris hits upon the only daughter of a local theater magnate, wooing her with poetry written by his cousin Crip. But then the girlfriend sends the poem into the college literary magazine and it is a big hit with the editor, a gorgeous gentile girl, Bridget, who Morris falls for hard. Now he has to choose between money and security and love and happiness, with everyone in his family pulling for money and security, while his heart and loins are pulling for love and happiness. He better make the right choice because his whole future depends on it. And even if he does marry the gentile, he tells himself, "Of course she [his mother] might topple over dead when I told her about Bridget, but that didn't seem too likely. Jewish mothers do very little actual dying from shicksas. A lot of hemorrhaging, of course. But actual dying is seldom."

This was a very funny and entertaining novel. Morris and his various family members are all amusing as are his two prospective brides. Eventually, Morris makes his choice and it turns out to be the best one and the story ends happily, dilemma solved. And it was a lot of fun getting there, for sure.

The Grapes of Wrath

By John Steinbeck

Pulitzer Prize winner in Novels, 1940.

This is the story of the Joads, a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, who are driven off their land by the prolonged drought of the dustbowl and by the change in agriculture from animal powered labor to the tractor. The small sharecrop sections were done away with as it was more efficient for a landowner to farm with a tractor and 1000 acres than to split it up into many small sections farmed by families and a team of mules or whatever.
The Joads have suffered through years of drought and crop failures, like many of their contemporaries. What little savings they may have are vanished and many are in debt trying to keep their families fed. When the landowner evicts them from their little section, these people have no money, no jobs and no prospects. Word gets around that there are lots of jobs in California, picking crops and fruit. So thousands of families packed up what they could on whatever vehicle they could acquire and headed west to the land of milk and honey, not realizing that everybody else was doing the same thing and they were all going to be competing for a limited number of jobs.
This story is about the Joad's trip out west and of the hardships they endure to get there and of the hardships they face once they make it to California. Because even though it is a land of great opportunity, there just aren't enough jobs to go around and because of the glut of laborers, the wages hit rock bottom and people are not able to earn enough money to feed their families.

This book has a very strong socialist slant and the socialist spiel is pretty tedious. But the story of the Joads is compelling and fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about their struggle. It is an amazing picture of an desperate era in American history.

Review by Melvin Bragg on The Guardian:    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/21/melvyn-bragg-on-john-steinbeck.