Growing Up

By: Russell Baker

Narrated by: Corey M. Snow

In this heartfelt memoir by the Masterpiece Theatre host, Pulitzer Prize winner, and groundbreaking New York Times columnist, Russell Baker traces his youth in the mountains of rural Virginia. When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed and matriarchal, never looked back. After all, she had three children to raise.

These were Depression years, and Mrs. Baker moved her fledgling family to Baltimore. Baker's mother was determined her children would succeed, and we know her regimen worked for Russell. He did everything from delivering papers to hustling subscriptions for the Saturday Evening Post. As is often the case, early hardships made the man.

©1982 Russell Baker (P)2017 Tantor

Well done Corey Snow…..

……….and it goes without saying Mr. Russell Baker cracked this memoir of sorts out of the park! A fantastic story that I wish kept on going. A great coming of age tale. I felt such a kinship with the author in the way he remembered so much of his childhood. A great blueprint to look at if I ever finally start my own memoir someday. Just captures life in the honest lens it goes by in. Hard at times, impossible at others, on top of the world sometimes, falling in love…..but all the while there’s always that “home” back there in our rearviewmirror and the story of how we made it to where we are today. The sacrifices that the people we have in our lives made for us. As we age we see things much clearer now. When it’s too late sometimes. Time is a cruel thing. If you don’t call your mother after reading this one then you had better go back to playing video games or something. I loved this book.

Wonderful biography of a great newspaperman

A great story that portrays life for so many of my parents generation. A reminder of wonderful can be even with its trials and tribulations. Not surprising it won a Pulitzer prize!

Good not great

This story was fine. It provided a different-ish look into a specific period of our country's past. The audio narration was good but the written "narrator" came off a bit arrogant and frustrating at times. good enough as a story, but not sure I would recommend it. take it or leave it.

Authentic and Heart Warming

Russell Baker’s Growing Up provides a charming and thoughtful story of his life up until marriage. It gives a powerful view of what it was like growing up during the depression and World War II. I was surprised at the end that I found myself in tears at the beauty and simplicity of this epic work, it is so human. It deserved the Pulitzer Prize.

Lovely book

Sorry it ended such a well written and organized book. The story was told beautifully. I Loved it.

Excellent memoir

I am a scholar of women's autobiographies/memoirs: so this is an extremely MALE one. The tone, the focus, the authorial voice (obviously). Very different therefore from what I generally seek and love. However, "Growing Up" is an extremely pleasant story (despite the ugliness of life, sometimes) told by an exquisite writer. Great narration, great book. Highly recommended.

One of my favorites!

I’ve read this book two or three times since the publication. Each time I found something new to relate to even though I’m female and was born at the end of 1959, quite different from Russell Baker.
Today I finished listening to the recorded version and again I found his take on life engaging and relatable. Do yourself a favor and spend some time with Growing Up.

Nostalgia Done Well

Like the man , this book is pleasantly thoughtful, lightly humorous, modest and yet penetrating in the candor of its self-reflections. Its greatest strength however is the way Baker evokes the common practices and beliefs of average, middle-brow, and sorely threatened Americans who had to guide themselves into various safe harbors as the Great Depression built its network of misery throughout the country. One extended, wrenching part of the book is Baker's use of courtship letters written by an amiable salesman to Baker's widowed mother. Even though the mother's part of the correspondence is missing, the story of these two, ultimately disappointed strivers cuts to the heart of the hardships endured by millions.

Nostalgic

loved it!! I first read this in 1988, and I've always had a copy around, since

It's good, very good, but...

I love to hear the stories of "everyday people." There are usually so many nuggets of truth and wisdom to be gleaned.

However, I found this story, not to be an "uninteresting" story, but extremely ordinary, without much suspense or humor. I may have laughed once the entire book.

Primarily, I read the book because the author's memoir fell almost exactly into the time period in which my father was a child. I wanted to better understand the world of my father's youth and perhaps this book helped a little. But, I had already learned from my father that times were hard in the 1930's. This memoir did little to tell me anything that I did not already know.

It was a different, and tougher world. The "poverty-stricken" of today would have been considered most blessed during the Great Depression. But, I knew that, too.

I am grateful to Mr. Baker to leave us this account of that most harsh era of modern American history. It is insightful. However, I must honestly say that, unlike Angela's Ashes, I find nothing particularly compelling about the story... It simply is what it is...a story of an ordinary, depression era family. Although fiction, it would not even approach the same class as Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. It's hard to see how this engaging little memoir won a Pulitzer.