The spirit of the ghetto (John Harvard Library) [Hardcover]

Hutchins Hapgood (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 315 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674832655
• ISBN-13: 978-0674832657
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,341,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Spirit in Hapgood's ghetto, June 1, 2009

By 

M. Newman - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Spirit of the Ghetto (Belknap Press) (Paperback)

This book came highly recommended as a window into the lives of the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side and I was quite eager to read it. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Although Mr. Hapgood was accurate in the portrayal of his subjects, his portraits appeared dry and obviously written by a non-Jewish outsider. His "Spirit of the Ghetto" was actually pretty spiritless and came off as an anthropological study. For a more interesting and realistic picture of these dynamic people, I suggest Irving Howe's "World of Our Fathers" or the fiction of Abraham Cahan. The beautiful drawings of Jacob Epstein, however, compensate for the shortcomings of Hapgood's stilted prose and make this book a worthwhile purchase.