Books That Transport You to "Your" Era

I was poking around in my local library, not looking for anything specific and...

I stumbled upon a copy of Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure : the true story of a great American road trip by Matthew Algeo. What a charming story! It isn't great literature, but very evocative of this long ago era. It's the story of Harry and Bess Truman leaving the White House after his full term as president and driving without any Secret Service escort through the eastern US, stopping in local diners, staying in "ma and pa" motels, seeing the country and visiting old friends and their daughter. It's interwoven with Algeo's comments and observations about recreating the trip himself and comments about the lack of any pension for the retiring president at the time and Harry's concerns over personal finances.

The cover photo alone is worth the price of the book. It's a shot of Harry and Bess through the windshield of their car; Bess looking like she's telling Harry something and Harry with a huge, broad smile looking like he just cleaned his friends out in a poker game.

It's a quick read and will make your day.

What have you read that takes you back to "your" era?

I'm not quite qualified for this group yet, but I was intrigued by the topic. I'm definitely going to look for Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure. It sounds like the kind of thing someone should have made up, if it hadn't really happened.

just requested it from the library.

I don't really remember Truman but I've been told that I saw him campaigning when I was only two - one of those back of a train stops to give a speech.

William Price Fox captured perfectly, with great humor, growing up in the Carolinas during the 50's! in: 'Moonshine Light, Moonshine Bright', a novel and: 'Southern Fried Plus 6' short stories

I still enjoy reading my Erma Bombeck books, the old originals.
Betty MacDonald is good, too. The Egg and I

My sons Godfather grew up next door to the Bombecks in Columbus, Oh. He played with her kids and had lunch with them many times. They were all good friends.

Thanks for reminding me of Betty MacDonald , what fun. I also fondly remember Junior Miss by Sally Benson, and my grandmother was a big fan of Mary Lasswell.

I spent my summers with relatives in Wisconsin in the 1950s. The Garrison Keillor novels about that part of the country transport me back to those times and places, and I like to re-read them for all the memories they evoke.

I will not claim that the following transported me back to "my era" however it did focus on a part of American history which was very interesting to me as a child. The Last Gunfight re-tells the story of the gunfight at the OK Corral (which did not happen at the Corral but nearby). Jeff Guinn does a great job of describing the "old west" at the very end of the 19th Century, and beginnings of the 20th Century, and describes the struggles and conflicts between all the disparate groups trying to "settle" the West and those who were already living in the West. Many of our grandparents and great grandparents experienced all this. Fascinating look at Wyatt Earp and his brothers and compatriots and enemies.

Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin was nostalgia for me. Even though it takes place in New York and there was a lot of baseball talk I was not that interested in, the book evokes a time of small neighborhoods, kids running around playing; it just took me home to my small suburb in Los Angeles. It made me weep for all that's been lost since that time.

oh, dang it! I've got that book buried somewhere in the TBR piles, I think maybe on an e-reader, and I need to bump it up!

#13 I hope you find it! The only other book I have read by her is No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Before my time but I like reading about that era, 1930s - 1940s. I enjoyed that book as well and think she is a great writer, easy to read and excellent.

14> Marell,
If you like to read about the 30's you may 1939 The Lost World of the Fair by David Gelernter.

#15 I'll put that book on my TBR list. Thanks for the recommendation.

I am sixty so found this group when I searched for the souls all out there as having reached that milestone. My "era" would be the 70s and probably one of the best depictions of my experience was the only Pynchon novel I've read, which is his latest, "inherent vice." It perfectly captured those crazy days and I understand they might make a movie of it.

I like to think that Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test did a pretty good job of giving one definition to an era

In #17. Actually, the whole question is intriguing, and deceptively simple. As for me, I was thinking how very odd that the huge public matters of my younger days (the Cold War, the almost-hot war known as "The Cuban Missile Crisis, race, the VietNam war, and the so-called "sexual revolution") have been nowhere near adequately studied in any fiction I've read, especially fiction. Still, mkbird's mention of Tom Pynchon resonates with my an almost-nomination for this group, namely his second novel, THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (also his short story "Lowlands"). For those Midwesterners of my age (sixties), Jack Wennerstrom's novels BLACK COFFEE and PHEASANT ALLEY have more than a little which is absolutely right, as documentation and as evocations of some of the moods of those days. On a lighter note, I am a big fan of Dan Pinkwater's CHICAGO DAYS, HOBOKEN NIGHTS, and THE EDUCATION OF ROBERT NIFKIN. O yeah, before somebody takes me to the wood-shed on the subject of Viet Nam war fiction, yes, I know all about Tim O'Brien, yet I remain unimpressed. Let's keep up this discussion! -- Goddard

In re#18. I know there are -- mercifully -- no Right Answers in these matters, but still I must gently decline to share in your enthusiasm for Tom Wolfe. I think the book was dedicated mostly to showing-off his glittering (some might call it "cutesy", or even "kutsey") writing style, with the subject-matters far behind. Peace anyway, and always, -- Goddard

I don't have a single era that I think of as "mine," though there are some where I felt more like an unwilling and unwanted passenger. I was born in 1938, and grew into consciouness of the world around me in the midst of WW II. I was a precocious reader, and could read at a third grade level in kindergarten. I latched onto the my father's copy of Park Kendall's Gone With the Draft, and poured over it, plaguing the adults in my family to tell me what all the hard words meant. Later I came to think of From Here to Eternity as my Forties book. I grew up in the same part of western New York State as Joyce Carol Oates, and am the same age and went to university with her. And her book With Shuddering Fall is the early Fifties, the latter Fifties is definitely Allan Ginsburgs Howl. I stepped off the bus in NYC after university with fifty bucks and a new suit, and a small suitcase...I ended up living first in a rundown Hispanic neighborhood, and when I lost my job, in a dollar a day little hotel in Hell's Kitchen. My early years were full of scrapes and misadventures, and rather anachronistically it is Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer that reminds me of that time. By the mid and late Sixties I was teaching college kids , and I boned up on what they were into by reading Alan Watts' Psychotherapy East and West and Sartre's Nausea and The Prisoner of Altona, and they remain "my" late Sixties, despite having nothing to do with the Hippies et al. Mel Cheren's autobiography Keep on Dancin' is a big bite of the 70's. The Eighties, an especially repugnant decade in my estimation, is Russell Bank's Continental Drift and Thom Gunn's Night Sweats and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.