Nonfiction: The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression, John F. Kasson

The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
John F. Kasson
ISBN: 9780393240795
Read October 3, 2014

I don't know that I can recommend this book as a book.  The individual chapters have a lot going for them, and the overarching concept is solid, but the execution is badly flawed.  From the cover, we seem to have a fairly secure idea: we're going to be looking at how Shirley Temple helped America overcome the Great Depression.  Or, we're going to be taking a look at America in the Great Depression, through a lens of Shirley Temple movies.

Sadly, that isn't really what we're getting, and I think in this case, it's all the editor's fault.  The author admits at the end (and it's terribly clear during the reading) that this final book is formed from a collection of already-created essays or talks or presentations or short publications about various topics of the Great Depression: about Shirley Temple's movies, and about Shirley Temple's childhood, and about the movie industry, and about the entertainment journalism industry, and about how dour and unlikeable Hoover was, and about the presidential campaign at the beginning of the Depression, and about the cult of personality that FDR indulged in, and about how Shirley ended her movie career and got married and became a diplomat, and about the presidential campaigns at the end of the Depression, and about the growing market for branded toys and events... are you beginning to see?

We have a LOT of material here, and under a skillful editor (and someone willing to kill their darlings) we might have gotten a coherent thematic journey out of it.  Either one of the two approaches that the cover teases would have been lovely.  (I'd personally have preferred the first option.)  Sadly, neither one really gets any traction because the author bounds back and forth between already published materials, only marginally related, plopping great hunks of discourse in about one tangent, then leaping onward to another great blob of information about something completely different (but still in America (mostly) and still in the Depression (mostly) instead of simply staying on track.

Now, along the strange multifaceted herky-jerky trip we do end up on, we learn a great deal about all of the topics I mentioned above.  It's just a shame that none of them are really ever related to each other, or to the Great Depression as a whole, or to the strange phenomenon that was Shirley Temple's career.

A let-down to be sure, especially since the information that was presented about the movie and entertainment industry could very easily have been worked into a more agile treatment of presidential image consciousness and the development of journalism and entertainment presses in creating trends and concepts for mainstreet Americans to latch on to.