A Walk Toward Oregon A Memoir Author:Alvin M. Josephy Jr. From the distinguished historian -- celebrated for his writings about the American West and American Indians -- an account of his journey across the twentieth century. — Impassioned participant in and acute observer of the life of his times, Alvin Josephy takes us from the New York of the teens and twenties to the 1990s on the Oregon ranch where ... more »he has found his heart's home. His "walk" leads him to Harvard during the hopeful days of the New Deal; to scriptwriting for MGM in Hollywood and menial work on Wall Street in the Depression; through a job with the Herald Tribune (for which he interviewed Leon Trotsky); to the wartime landings on Iwo Jima and Guam, which he covered as a Marine Corps combat correspondent; to an antiwar march with Martin Luther King, Jr.; to his profound involvement in Native American and environmental causes.
Josephy tells how it was that he found his true calling -- becoming an advocate for American Indians and the land they once called their own. In a wonderful way, he gives witness to two Americas: He renders the excitement of the go-go industrial expansionist nation that came into being in the first half of the century and burst onto the world after the war. At the same time he chronicles our growing awareness of another America -- the land and people who had no voice as the country around them grew.
His astute understanding of the events he witnessed and became part of, and the spirited, evocative quality of his narrative, combine to capture the life, the turmoil, the problems, progress, setbacks, and satisfactions, of this American Century.
A Walk Toward Oregon will move and delight readers who have lived these years themselves, as well as the young who want to know firsthand what came before them. It will stand as an indispensable document of our time.« less