Praying For Bread And Roses Analysis

In the novels, Praying for Sheetrock and Bread and Roses, both authors tell a story about how a group of people struggled in their lives. Both novels are based off of true stories with small portions of fiction in order to give the stories more depth. In Praying for Sheetrock, by Melissa Greene, the reader is placed in a small county on Georgia called McIntosh during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The overall theme of Praying for Sheetrock is based on African Americans fighting for a better way of life equal to their, more powerful, white neighbors. As for Bread and Roses, by Bruce Watson, this novels overall theme sets the reader in Lawrence Massachusetts where workers fight for a better way of life in the labor setting. Each novels theme can be analyzed, compared, and discussed in order to further understand the connections between them. Praying for Sheetrock puts the reader in a third person perspective of the events that slowly unfold between the lives of African Americans and whites. The novel can be broken down into three basic categories of analysis, economic inequality, racism, and civil rights. All of the categories can be linked back to the same man Tom Poppell in one way or another. Tom Poppell was the sheriff of McIntosh County and can be …show more content…
I enjoyed reading Bread and Roses because I never really got to get a first person account on how the labor unions worked. My only reference to the labor unions were what I had read in a textbook. The book gave me a more broad understanding on how the people had to deal with their lives and how they grew to a better one. For Praying for Sheetrock it is always inspiring to hear how the African American people rose up and challenged the status quo. With these ideas the new read on the accounts in Bread and Roses led me to liking the novel more since it was the first time I have read something like