Children of Crisis, Volume 2: Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers

Children of Crisis #2

by Robert Coles

Since the late 1950's, Robert Coles has been studying, living with, and, above all, listening to the American poor. The result is one of the most vigorous and searching social studies ever undertaken by one man in the United States. Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers is the second volume in Dr. Coles's award-winning series, Children of Crisis. In it, he listens to three groups: the migrant workers who travel the eastern coast of this country, picking crops day after day; the sharecroppers and tenant farmers who live on isolated southern plantations, just as their ancestors did as slaves; and the mountaineers of Appalachia, whose only choice lies between coal mining and starvation.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

653 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 1973

About the author

Child psychiatrist, author, Harvard professor.

Robert Coles is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard College.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Co-winner for 1973 Pulitzer nonfiction. Both Coles volume 2 and 3 won for the prize….tied with another book, I only read book 2. Cole: , s Harvard professor of psychology spent time interviewing migrant workers, sharecroppers and mountaineers in the 60s to get a sense of their children, its an interesting book, and reading it in 2025 , it an interesting view of an era that is largely gone. It does bog down in places and becomes tough to read but largely a good book,

[Terragyrl3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book documents the lives of the rural underclass in the US in the 1960s. It’s a monumental work, if a little dated, and a clear snapshot of one species of poverty. The author, Robert Coles, was connected to The Great Society project under LBJ.

Coles was committed to recording real accounts from real people and he treats everyone with dignity. However, his dated conceptions do warp the study. For example, Coles gets people to talk about many social injustices that come with poverty, and yet there’s zero mention of the sex economy, sex work, sexual coercion, and rape. These would be pretty profound realities for vulnerable populations, but I guess a gentlemanly academic code of the time prevented Coles from going there.

More problematic for me, however, is the slavish devotion to recording people’s stories in their own vernacular. It’s just too repetitive for smooth reading. Studs Terkel used the same technique—and I don’t care for his books, either.

In all, I respect the complexity of the picture Coles paints. No single race or class is demonized. (But the racial epithets do abound, so be forewarned.) By today’s standards. I think the book could be half this length. At 600-plus pages, this book is just one of five volumes in Coles’s master opus. Two volumes won the 1973 Pulitzer.