Plenty, Plenty Soul

Radicalized after a 15,000 mile journey through America during the Great Depression, Mel Fiske recounts his unusual stints as labor organizer and worker in steel mills, railroad roundhouses, freight-car assemblies, and tire factories--jobs that have since disappeared. He worked for newspapers in various states, once serving as correspondent for the Daily Worker in Washington, D.C., where he covered the rise of the Truman-McCarthy-Hoover Red Hunt that roiled our country through the Fifties.

Fiske gives the reader his grunt's eye-view of life as a Marine in the Pacific—particularly the bloody but little-remembered battle for Peleliu. He tells of his family life in the Bronx and Brooklyn, when a subway ride or an ice cream cone cost a nickel, and when his father prospered as a printer during the Depression by schmearing, or giving bribes.

With blunt honesty and wryness, he recalls his first love and marriage, which ended with a Dear John letter as World War II atomized to its conclusion. This book is not simply a memoir, but a look at twentieth-century America from the point of view of a man who, galvanized by the injustices he both witnessed and experienced, struck out in his own radical way.