William Attaway's BLOOD ON THE FORGE powerfully depicts both the Black migration to the industrial north after WWI and the startling hell-like environment of the vast iron & steel works of the era. No other writer--novelist, sociologist, historian--has ever captured so well the compelling, visceral experience of the humans working these sacrificial jobs. As Attaway walks us through the vast furnace & forge areas of the works, our own skin scorches along with that of his worker-protagonists. We become party to the daily struggle to survive the most appalling working conditions.

This novel deserves a place on the highest level of our American esteem. It's tragic Attaway was unable to produce more work, since both his vision of the American experience and his fictive language were intense, revelatory and precious to anyone wishing to know and acknowledge this nation's true industrial and racial history.

In The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann tells several interwoven tales. One is about Mississippi sharecroppers who migrated to Chicago during the middle decades of the century. Another is about the bungled policies of President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty." Binding them together is Mr. Lemann's attempt to understand why the United States has a black underclass that probably lives in greater squalor and desperation than any other people on earth. The book's perspective is the by now standard one that pins most of the blame for black failure on white racism, and it leads to a call for an "ambitious wave of new programs" that will bring the underclass into the American mainstream. Nevertheless, The Promised Land is by no means a simple rehash of the liberal clichés of the 1960s. Mr. Lemann does not gloss over the failures that stemmed from the soft-headed zeal for uplift that characterized the period. At the same time, his accounts of the lives of underclass blacks do not leave an impression of helplessness and victimization so much as one of fecklessness and self-destruction. The author coats his facts with a layer of liberal indulgence, but he has gathered the facts and they are not pretty.

"The Promised Land" is a fascinating study of the effects, both on the "immigrants" themselves and on America, of the migration of Blacks from the Mississippi Delta to the industrial cities of the North, in this case, specifically Chicago. The book traces the experiences of a group of individuals who made the migration, telling their story through time, beginning with the immigrants and continuing on with the families they built in the North, with a rough time frame of the 1940's - 1970's.

The book comprises 2 basic strengths: the approach to the material and the resulting structure in which the story is told, and the sheer interest of the events themselves and the people who lived them.

The author approaches the story he wishes to tell in two ways: He relates the story of the people themselves, giving these sections of the book an oral history like content, but intermixes the chapters with those based on an analytic, scholarly approach, where the individual strories previously related are woven into the bigger historical picture. The approach works wonderfully, giving the book a structure both readable as a straightforward story of human beings relating their own very personal roles in historical events but also allowing the reader to put these events in a greater historical context, to understand for instance the sad downward slope experienced in the Black working class communities as the years passed. The early immigrants made their way to Black sections of Chicago which, while segregated and relatively poor compared to the White sections, also managed to provide at least the basis of a thriving community, in which work was available and there was a hope of moving up in the world. The comparison of these communities in the 1940's to the boarded up, drug infested no-man's land some of them were to become later is startling.

Some of the resulting questions raised are fascinating, especially in the current environment with the all-out effort to replace welfare with workfare. At it's most extreme is the question raised by Federal Welfare authorities as to whether it is perhaps better to just support people in the Mississippi Delta with welfare, given that the outlay is relatively minor, as opposed to encouraging people to move North. They might improve their lot with better jobs not available in the Delta but with the risk that they will perhaps end up on welfare forcing the authorities to pay out much more in benefits than would be necessary to pay in the Delta with it's significantly lower standard of living.

In the final analysis however, it is the stories of the immigrants which really take center stage and make reading this book such a satisfying experience. In a world of jet planes and instant electronic communications it is hard to imagine to almost biblical migration which took place all by virtue of a scheduled train line, people being transported to a profoundly different world by a day or so of travel, a world which at least initially offered a degree of prosperity and an improvement in ,living standards way beyond that of the Delta they left behind. The fragility of that life in the "promised land" however would become sadly apparent in the mixed experiences the future was to hold for the immigrants and their families and in the sad decline of their communities.

Driven by the disappearance of the Industries and Stockyards whose jobs fueled the great migration in the first place this movement eventually ground to a halt. Victims of both economic and racial segregation, the once dynamic Black working class communities of Chicago became more and more isolated and desolate as jobs became ever scarcer and drugs and welfare took a firmer hold. Those residents who had prospered and could afford to do so left for the suburbs open to them, while those who for whatever reason, whether their own failings or just an inability to keep up with a changing world were left to reside in the inner city in such stark monuments to failed policies as the Robert Taylor homes.

"The Promised Land" captures an episode in American history not likely to be repeated, and does so in a manner which combines the best of both analytic and anecdotal writing styles, driven by the heartfelt and exciting rembrances of the particpants themselves, those who comprised the great migration to the promised land.

This was an excellent combination of conveying historical fact with painting the picture by telling the stories of several people and families who lived the history. A fascinating period in history and a great read.

Read the first fifteen pages and set it aside. This was a purchase I made a year ago, and it is on a subject that highly interests me. But it is really just a rather droll take on the evolution of the SAT test from job-interest tests. Thumbs down.

One of the great things about Lemann is the way he writes history that straddles the line between social/cultural history and tradtional, political history. The Big Test does that very nicely, and in so doing points out that educational testing became a de facto part of American life without ever being voted on by the citizenry or elected officials. It just happened.

Lemann's interest in his subject seems to fade in and out. The first 50 pages of The Big Test are painful reading. Lemann's boredom shows through in frequent 65-word sentences that he didn't bother editing down. But by the mid-1950s, Lemann hits his stride, colorfully explaining how the SAT and other standardized tests became a part of educational life. He carries his discussion of educational testing into the 1980s and 90s by picking examples of "typical Americans" and telling their stories. It his here, when Lemann applies his background as a journalist to write narrative history, that the book is at its best. It is here that Lemann points out the inequities that have the SAT propogates and builds a case that we need to make changes in our educational testing system. Just when you want a chapter wrapping it all up, a chapter in which Lemann presents his argument for change, you get it. Lemann's final chapter or two should be mandatory reading for educators and admissions officers.

Having looked over the other reader reviews for this book, I am surprised by what the reviewers expected this book to be about. It is not an expose on the SAT. It is, rather, a look at the Test (capital letter intended). It is a look into the people and philosophies that shaped Educational testing and, to be frank, America itself.
Lemann portrays the key players involved in the testing movement, its propagation, and its continuation to the present day. He also gives to us a look into the Meritocratic (or rulers determined by their merit rather than money) society envisoned by Jefferson.
This is an extremely interesting book. This book will leave you thinking. You will challenge your own ideologies.