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Title details for A Secret Gift by Ted Gup - Wait list

A Secret Gift

How One Man's Kindness—and a Trove of Letters—Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression

by Ted Gup
Mark Deakins
Audiobook
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Shortly before Christmas 1933 in Depression-scarred Canton, Ohio, a small newspaper ad offered cash gifts to seventy-five families in distress. Readers were asked to send letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdot. The author’s grandfather, Sam Stone, was inspired to place this ad and help his fellow Cantonians as they prepared for the cruelest Christmas most of them would ever endure.
Moved by the stories of suffering and hope in the letters, which he discovered in a suitcase seventy-five years later, Ted Gup first sets out to unveil the lives behind them, searching for records and relatives to flesh out the family sagas hinted at in those letters. From these sources, Gup has re-created the impact that B. Virdot’s gift had on each family.
But as he uncovers the suffering and triumphs of dozens of strangers, Gup also learns that Sam Stone was far more complex than the lovable-retiree persona he’d always shown his grandson. Gup solves a singular family mystery even as he pulls away the veil of eight decades that separate us from the hardships that united America during the Depression.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 9, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307578068
      • File size: 288192 KB
      • Duration: 10:00:23

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The author finds a huge box of letters to his father, all written in December 1933. The father had placed an anonymous ad in the Canton, Ohio, newspaper offering to send $10 to some worthy readers who applied. The heartfelt supplications for help became the focus of this audiobook, a collection of the requests felt to be the most demonstrative of the zeitgeist, the social mores, and the hardship at America's lowest ebb. Narrator Mark Deakins's lusterless and dispirited treatment adds to the Depression's depression. As he switches from the author's supporting information to quoting the revealing and sincere applications, one can sense that Deakins's interpretation capitalizes on the letters' sadness. The desperate pleas summarize the hopeless attitudes on that Christmas as no discourse could do. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 6, 2010
      In a book grown out of a New York Times op-ed piece that drew a huge response, Gup (The Book of Honor) explores an unusual act of generosity by his grandfather, Sam Stone, during the Great Depression and other mysteries of Stone's life. Discovering a trunk full of old letters addressed to "Mr. B. Virdot," Gup soon learned that the letters were responses to a newspaper ad Stone ran before Christmas 1933, anonymously promising $10 to 75 of Canton, Ohio's neediest families if they wrote letters describing their hardships. (Some of the heartbreaking letters are reprinted here.) But Gup soon learns that Stone had other secrets: the jovial, wealthy businessman had escaped a horrific childhood as a Romanian Jew, immigrating to America and reinventing himself to fit into all-American Canton, Ohio. Gup also tracked down families who benefited from Stone's gift to discover the impact it had on their lives. Gup paints sobering pictures of "the Hard Times" and the gift made by a successful man who hadn't forgotten his own hard times.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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