Growing Up

Growing Up is Russell Baker's own account of his childhood, told from a hardscrabble upbringing in rural Virginia during the Depression, his father's early death from complications of diabetes, and his mother Lucy Elizabeth Baker's fierce, often overwhelming determination that her children rise above the poverty the family had fallen into, a determination that sent Russell and part of the family to live with relatives in New Jersey. Baker narrates the specific texture of that displacement, a boy shuttled into a household that was not quite his own, watched over by a mother who wanted more for her son than she had ever gotten for herself.

Baker narrates his own path from a boy who decided at eleven that writing was the one kind of work that did not feel like real work, through Baltimore City College, and into a newspaper career that would eventually make him one of the country's most widely syndicated columnists. The book stays close to the texture of ordinary Depression era family life, the small humiliations of being poor and the daily bargaining of a household stretched thin, rather than reaching for a larger argument about the era.

Baker writes with the same plain, dry wit that made his New York Times column famous for decades, turning what could have been a grim account of poverty and family strain into something genuinely funny as often as it is sad. Reading it means following a memoirist who trusts specific, small scale memory over sweeping reflection, and it suits a reader who wants an American childhood rendered honestly, without either self pity or nostalgia doing the work instead of real observation.