Necessary Trouble
Growing Up at Midcentury
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions—not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives.
A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted” and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own—one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.
Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.
Includes black-and-white images
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this compelling memoir, one of America’s leading historians (and the first female president of Harvard University) reveals the experiences that shaped her life. Born in 1947, young Drew Gilpin was just nine when a radio report about segregated schools shocked her into writing a letter to the president. This would be just the first step in a lifetime of activism that saw her visit the Eastern Bloc during high school and later join protests fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Faust does an amazing job putting her personal experiences into the context of the seismic changes that shaped her generation, giving us a powerfully human and very intimate view of recent American history. If you want to understand the cultural shifts that defined the mid-20th century, this book is a must.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former Harvard president Faust (This Republic of Suffering) nimbly blends the personal and the political in this affecting memoir that covers her life from 1947 (the year she was born) through 1968. Faust, who was raised in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, had difficult relationships with both of her parents: her WWII veteran father was perpetually disengaged, and her upper-class mother was often angry. Disenchanted with their conservative worldviews, Faust forged her own, shaped by the literature of the era, including To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Her outrage at racist discrimination led a nine-year-old Faust to write to then President Eisenhower to share her feelings that a segregated society was an unjust one (the memoir opens with a photocopy of this letter). Faust furthered her focus on "notions of justice, equality and patriotism" at Bryn Mawr College as a student activist and protester against Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. Her epilogue closes on a note of hope, looking ahead to the moment in 2008 when her home state of Virginia "cast its electoral ballots for the first Black president." Faust pulls off a brilliant synthesis, grounding the macro stresses of the period in her quest to distance herself from her culture of origin and sharpen her political sensibilities. A follow-up volume exploring her life after 1968 would be more than welcome.
