Whose Names Are Unknown (Audible Audio Edition) Sanora Babb Alyssa Bresnahan Recorded Books Books
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Sanora Babb' s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author' s firsthand experience.
This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt' s father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat.
Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Duanne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants.
The system labels all farmers like them as worthless " Okies" and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can' t possibly feed their children.
The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest.
Whose Names Are Unknown (Audible Audio Edition) Sanora Babb Alyssa Bresnahan Recorded Books Books
Whose Names Were Unknown, by Sanora Babb, is an excellent novel with an interesting back story. Babb was an aspiring writer in the 1930s when she took a job providing government assistance to Dust Bowl migrants who worked agricultural fields in California. John Steinbeck came to the camp while researching what would become The Grapes of Wrath. He talked with her, and she shared her notes. Babb went on to complete her own manuscript, which was accepted by Bennett Cerf at Random House for publication. When Steinbeck beat her to press, Cerf cancelled publication on Babb's book believing there was no room for two books on the same topic.Babb, put away the manuscript going on to a successful career as an author. In 2004 the book was finally published, thankfully. Her story, in contrast to Steinbeck's, focuses on the daily lives of farmers in the Oklahoma panhandle. She has a real talent for both creating natural dialog, and vivid description of place and setting. The first half chronicles the lives of several families struggling to make ends meet in the face of economic and natural hardships. Her descriptions of the great dust storms that blanketed Oklahoma are particularly well done. She puts a real face on people who have largely been seen only as victims of calamity. Yet these were people with dreams, goals, ambitions and resilience. Babb tells their story with humanity.
The second part of her book takes some of her characters to the fields of California. This is the story Steinbeck told, but again Babb delves into everyday life in ways Steinbeck did not. She also tells the story of low wages, filthy labor camps, and other abuses faced by these migrants who were given the pejorative name of Okies. The title of the book comes from the eviction notices routinely given tenants in farm camps: To John and Mary Smith whose true names are unkown... Sanora Babb has given names to these Americans.
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Whose Names Are Unknown (Audible Audio Edition) Sanora Babb Alyssa Bresnahan Recorded Books Books Reviews
Sanora Babb's book 'feels' deeper than John Steinbeck's version of that same era, and yet, both are 'must reads' in their own particular way. With this book, I somehow felt more to be part of the story, part of that time, perhaps so because I had only recently read "The Grapes" after decades since the first time. These decades themselves have added value with many experiences a younger person simply cannot have. It seems that I'm reading 'something' all the time, but looking back at my repertoire not nearly as many titles come up as should, so because I don't necessarily read for entertainment, but to satisfy my curiosity about life and its many facets, its many Whys. Similar to the traditions of Northern Peoples, the Inupiat, Inuit et al are rife with storytelling, repeated over and over, telling of events observed over many generations, I too repeat my reads. It is along similar lines that I value books, but they must teach certain values, values for the good of humanity. 'Whose names are unknown' relates such values, impressions of what people in any of the ages have experienced and are still experiencing in spite of the always current false fronts that 'things are getting better'. They're not! Not in the greater context of things, like modern technology and so on. This book concerns our times just as accurately as it did the Dust Bowl era and can make one realize that powers, unreachable by common man, are still manipulating each and every one of us' daily affairs in whatever way. That banksters are still the ones who pull the strings and their corporate allies are still making sure no common worker gets away with too much. We're ever more a country divided and at war in ever more places. You may read this book and feel that some of us have even less - family wise - than the people of Babb's era had, and that 'Things' will never replace intimacy. It's a thought-provoking book indeed.
I have always been fascinated by stories of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. I have read many books (The Worst Hard Time, The Grapes of Wrath, etc...) on both the greatest economic catastrophe and the greatest interrelated weather tragedy our country has ever faced. I enjoy looking at photographs taken during the period. In the faces of the folks who struggled to survive during this period, I see my parents and grandparents staring at me, telling me to be grateful for what I have. Those feelings and my great curiosity about how these brave folks survived led me to Sanora Babb's novel.
Babb was born in 1907 in Oklahoma Territory. Her family later moved to the Oklahoma Panhandle. She experienced what she writes about. She taught school for a time and wrote for farm magazines. She moved to California when she was twenty-two to become an AP reporter, but the depression stopped that. Babb was usually broke and at times, homeless.
The title to Babb's book came from an actual eviction notice To John Doe and Mary Doe Whose Names Are Unknown. She wrote the book during the thirties while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California.
One of her closest contacts with the FSA was Tom Collins, the founding manager of the Weedpatch migrant labor camp in Arvin, California. Collins asked Babb to keep notes of what was taking place. He was impressed enough by her writing that he passed on her research to another writer who was visiting the camp to research a novel. That writer was John Steinbeck. Babb reports meeting him twice.
It is easy to imagine that her notes played a critical role in his writing of The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that later took America by storm. Babb submitted her manuscript to Random House in 1939 even though the giant publisher seldom looked at agentless manuscripts. Cofounder and editor Bennett Cerf (remember him from the old TV show What's My Line?) liked what he saw and sent her an advance.
But Babb's and Cerf's plans were dashed when The Grapes of Wrath sold almost half a million copies in five months. Cerf backed off her manuscript, saying it was too much like Steinbeck's book. She was also rejected by Scribner's and Colliers. Steinbeck's editor at Viking sent her a letter indicating no interest in publishing a novel that would compete with their star writer.
So the manuscript sat unpublished for more than sixty years. The story of Julia and Milt Dunne that begins with their struggles in Cimarron County of Oklahoma and migrates west to California remained untold. How does it compare to Steinbeck's great novel? Read it and judge for yourself.
Go Down Looking
Whose Names Were Unknown, by Sanora Babb, is an excellent novel with an interesting back story. Babb was an aspiring writer in the 1930s when she took a job providing government assistance to Dust Bowl migrants who worked agricultural fields in California. John Steinbeck came to the camp while researching what would become The Grapes of Wrath. He talked with her, and she shared her notes. Babb went on to complete her own manuscript, which was accepted by Bennett Cerf at Random House for publication. When Steinbeck beat her to press, Cerf cancelled publication on Babb's book believing there was no room for two books on the same topic.
Babb, put away the manuscript going on to a successful career as an author. In 2004 the book was finally published, thankfully. Her story, in contrast to Steinbeck's, focuses on the daily lives of farmers in the Oklahoma panhandle. She has a real talent for both creating natural dialog, and vivid description of place and setting. The first half chronicles the lives of several families struggling to make ends meet in the face of economic and natural hardships. Her descriptions of the great dust storms that blanketed Oklahoma are particularly well done. She puts a real face on people who have largely been seen only as victims of calamity. Yet these were people with dreams, goals, ambitions and resilience. Babb tells their story with humanity.
The second part of her book takes some of her characters to the fields of California. This is the story Steinbeck told, but again Babb delves into everyday life in ways Steinbeck did not. She also tells the story of low wages, filthy labor camps, and other abuses faced by these migrants who were given the pejorative name of Okies. The title of the book comes from the eviction notices routinely given tenants in farm camps To John and Mary Smith whose true names are unkown... Sanora Babb has given names to these Americans.
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