Time It Was or Big Squeeze

Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties

Author: Bill Eppridg

On June 6, 1968, at the age of 42 and at the height of his popularity, Robert F. Kennedy was tragically assassinated. Presidential candidate, U.S. Senator, environmentalist, father-Kennedy was all of these things-and, to many Americans, he embodied the power of possibility and positive change during a period of social unrest, racial inequality, and war.

Renowned Life photographer Bill Eppridge followed and photographed Kennedy during his early campaign days up to his untimely death, and A Time It Was features dynamic images of the public Kennedy, as well as rare, intimate ones, many of which have never before been published. An introduction by John E. Frook places the events in historical context, while Eppridge shares his insider's perspective on Kennedy. Released to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Kennedy's death, A Time It Was reveals why the memory and legacy of Kennedy and his dreams continue to be relevant today.

200 full-color and black-and-white photographs.

Publishers Weekly

From the "tens of thousands" of photographs he took of Robert Kennedy, former Life magazine photographer Eppridge has culled his most evocative images for this "photographic history of one of the nation's most compelling figures," published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Following Kennedy from 1966, Eppridge chronicled Kennedy's '68 presidential campaign trail, his battles with Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries and victory in California, which would have sent "his campaign into orbit." Soon after the victory speech, Eppridge heard eight gunshots-"the sound I will never forget"-and snapped the grim final images of Kennedy, bleeding in the arms of a stunned supporter. A devastated Eppridge captured the national grief that followed, the funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C., attended everywhere by "a cross-section of America... old, young, women, men, black, white." The photographer's dual focus on the candidate (whose back, legs and hands are caught more often than his full face) and his audience (caught reaching, touching, running alongside, and lastly, saluting) speaks powerfully and wordlessly of Bobby Kennedy's charismatic presence in the late '60s. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

New interesting textbook:

Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

Author: Steven Greenhous

The Big Squeeze takes a fresh, probing, and often shocking look at the stresses and strains faced by tens of millions of American workers as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled.

Going behind the scenes, Steven Greenhouse tells the stories of software engineers in Seattle, hotel housekeepers in Chicago, call center workers in New York, and janitors in Houston, as he explores why, in the world’s most affluent nation, so many corporations are intent on squeezing their workers dry. We meet all kinds of workers: white collar and blue collar, high tech and low tech, middle income and low income; employees who stock shelves during a hurricane while locked inside their store, get fired after suffering debilitating injuries on the job, face egregious sexual harassment, and get laid off when their companies move high-tech operations abroad. We also meet young workers having a hard time starting out and seventy-year-old workers with too little money saved up to retire.

The book explains how economic, business, political, and social trends—among them globalization, the influx of immigrants, and the Wal-Mart effect—have fueled the squeeze. We see how the social contract between employers and employees, guaranteeing steady work and good pensions, has eroded over the last three decades, damaged by massive layoffs of factory and office workers and Wall Street’s demands for ever-higher profits. In short, the post–World War II social contract that helped build the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class has been replaced by a startling contradiction: corporateprofits, economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly while worker pay has languished and Americans face ever-greater pressures to work harder and longer.

Greenhouse also examines companies that are generous to their workers and can serve as models for all of corporate America: Costco, Patagonia, and the casino-hotels of Las Vegas among them. Finally, he presents a series of pragmatic, ready-to-be-implemented suggestions on what government, business, and labor should do to alleviate the squeeze.

A balanced, consistently revealing exploration of a major American crisis.

The Washington Post - H. W. Brands

Greenhouse has covered the labor beat for the New York Times for more than a decade, and his reporting skills serve his book's readers well. He alternates vignettes from the lives of individual workers with passages revealing the broader economic and political forces shaping workers' predicament…His recommendations for change—a higher minimum wage, better enforcement of laws against employers' cheating on wages, universal health insurance, mandatory retirement accounts in addition to Social Security, renewed government support for labor unions, transition training for workers laid off by outsourcing, a recommitment to public education—are reasonable and appropriate. But the current plight of American workers has been decades in the making, and absent a catastrophic failure of the system, it is hard to imagine how government will summon the will to effect the changes Greenhouse proposes.