The Great American Read: "Who Am I?"

Book lovers from sea to shining sea tuned in to PBS last night for “Who Am I?”, the first themed episode in The Great American Read—a new eight-part series that explores and celebrates the power of reading, told through the prism of America’s 100 favorite novels.
“Who Am I?” focused on some of the the country’s most beloved coming-of-age stories—books like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Catcher in the Rye, which have helped countless readers to understand their own identities and find their place in the world—and featured a host of fascinating interviews with Lauren Graham, John Green, S.E. Hinton, John Irving, Yahdon Israel, Devon Kennard, Diane Lane, George Lopez, Lisa Lucas, Armistead Maupin, Jason Reynolds, Joshua Rothman, Parul Seghal, Kevin Young, and others. 
As we’ll be doing the day after each week’s themed episode from now until the grand finale on October 23, we looked back through our Classic Reviews Archive to bring you what the critics said about some of these now-iconic books.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith 

The world was hers for the reading.

“A first novel of unusual quality and understanding, written with strong realism and compassion, sometimes bald, always human, this rightfully ranks with the Farrell genre, though, to my thinking, there is better balance and more sympathy. The slums of Brooklyn, and the Irish Catholics, form the setting for the story of Francie Nolan and her family: Johnny, her father, handsome and shiftless; Katie, her mother, hardening under years of poverty and improvidence; Neeley, Katie’s favorite child; Aunt Sissy, a good ‘bad woman,’ and chiefly Francie herself, gentle, shy, imaginative. The reader shares her humiliations at school, loss of face and pride her real sorrow when her father drinks himself to death; her ambition for a college education, thwarted when she must go to work at 14; her first love affair and disillusionment. Lusty—sometimes funny—consistently moving, this is a book for a discriminating public, not too tender skinned. But not for some Public Library open shelves.”

–Kirkus Reviews, August, 1943

*

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

“Mr. Salinger’s brilliant, funny, meaningful novel is written in the first person. Holden Caulfield is made to tell his own story, in his own strange idiom. Holden is not a normal boy. He is hypersensitive and hyper-imaginative (perhaps these are synonymous). He is double-minded. He is inexorably self-critical; at various times, he refers to himself as yellow, as a terrible liar, a madman, a moron.
…
“The literalness and innocence of Holden’s point of view in the face of the tremendously complicated and often depraved facts of life make for the humor of this novel: serious haggles with belligerent taxi-drivers; abortive conversational attempts with a laconic prostitute in a hurry; an ‘intellectual’ discussion with a pompous and phony intellectual only a few years older than himself; an expedition with Sally Hayes, which is one of the funniest expeditions, surely, in the history of juvenilia. Holden’s contacts with the outside world are generally extremely funny. It is his self-communings that are tragic and touching—a dark whirlpool churning fiercely below the unflagging hilarity of his surface activities.”

–S. N. Behrman, The New Yorker, August 11, 1951 ...

[mehr] https://bookmarks.reviews/the-great-american-read-who-am-i/