FDR's Alphabet Soup: New Deal America, 1932-1939 (review)

While recent children's and teen's literature on the Great Depression tends to focus on economic and social issues—bread lines, Hoovervilles, stock price plummets, Dust Bowl devastation—Bolden delivers a political history of the era, tracing Franklin Roosevelt's bold but arguably unconstitutional efforts to provide citizens with a variety of government safety nets to tide them through until the economy restabilized. She also follows the political fortunes of the president himself, as a desperate nation initially pins its hopes on his "alphabet soup" of acronymical agencies and acts that provide jobs and monetary support, and then suffers buyer's remorse as the sweeping executive orders begin to look a lot like dictatorship. If the very thought of political history strikes kids as dry as a mouthful of saltines, they haven't encountered Bolden's charged pacing and jazzed text, which reads like a passionate, witty teacher talking from the heart. Assuming her readers have attained some prior background on the Depression, she dives right in and hurls initials and acronyms (Roosevelt himself is referred to only as FDR), as if immersing readers in a foreign language; an excellent appended glossary, however, is always available to assist the overwhelmed. The clean, relatively spacious layout, with subtle allusions to Art Deco design, makes the presentation less daunting. Index and notes will make the title useful to report writers, but, as Bolden observes in her closing comments, this work is aimed at "teens quite capable of reading a book cover to cover."