To summarize the book Mother Jones is a proud, key figure of the American Labor movement played by the Irish immigrant Mary Jones. Elliot J. Gorn tells the lesser known facts of Mary Jones's life and reveals the truth behind the revisioned history of Mother Jones in her own stories or autobiography. For example, he will contrast the story told by Mother Jones of her parents reason for immigrating saying they were forced out of Ireland by the English after they rebelled, but a more likely story is the poverty and famine that came from the potato blight (Gorn 17).
As an educational book, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, is an excellent book. It does a superb job at telling two different stories simultaneously, the story of …show more content…
The writing feels too academic to read through in a single pass. Gorn is a historian who once taught at Yale so it is expected. In the introduction Gorn even states that people have forgotten the story of Mother jones and, “My purpose in writing this book is to resist such amnesia” (Gorn 6). This infers that the book is going to be academic in tone and parts are going to be hard to read through, if you aren’t used to it, because it's by a history professor and historians have a methodology to stick to and their stories are founded on solid research. The man has ninety pages of references and sources labeled in the notes. The book does do a good job of hitting the atrocities of the labor movement on the head without overemphasizing them. The book is interesting because it evokes emotion and sympathy for the laborers and builds respect for Mother Jones and her plights. I did find it humorous that Mother Jones, a female fighting for workers rights, was not for women's suffrage and racist. Kinda like my grandma. Mother jones did state, “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser”. In conclusion, Elliott J. Gorn’s book about Mother Jones is a great educational book because it gives overwhelming evidence for its points, teaches the necessity of labor unions, reveals the truth about Mary Jones, and why she behaved the way she did. As a book read for pleasure, it can be dense to read but can be entertaining
As an educational book, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, is an excellent book. It does a superb job at telling two different stories simultaneously, the story of …show more content…
The writing feels too academic to read through in a single pass. Gorn is a historian who once taught at Yale so it is expected. In the introduction Gorn even states that people have forgotten the story of Mother jones and, “My purpose in writing this book is to resist such amnesia” (Gorn 6). This infers that the book is going to be academic in tone and parts are going to be hard to read through, if you aren’t used to it, because it's by a history professor and historians have a methodology to stick to and their stories are founded on solid research. The man has ninety pages of references and sources labeled in the notes. The book does do a good job of hitting the atrocities of the labor movement on the head without overemphasizing them. The book is interesting because it evokes emotion and sympathy for the laborers and builds respect for Mother Jones and her plights. I did find it humorous that Mother Jones, a female fighting for workers rights, was not for women's suffrage and racist. Kinda like my grandma. Mother jones did state, “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser”. In conclusion, Elliott J. Gorn’s book about Mother Jones is a great educational book because it gives overwhelming evidence for its points, teaches the necessity of labor unions, reveals the truth about Mary Jones, and why she behaved the way she did. As a book read for pleasure, it can be dense to read but can be entertaining