Volume 45, Number 6 · April 9, 1998
Sidney Hook's Revolution
By Theodore H. Draper
Young Sidney Hook
by Christopher Phelps
Cornell University Press, 257 pp., $35.00
Sidney Hook started out in the world as a poor Jewish boy in Brooklyn. He was the fourth child of immigrant parents, his father from Moravia, his mother from Galicia. In the New World, his father became a tailor whose life was filled with little more than work. As a token of Americanization, his mother changed his first name from Saul to Sidney when he was enrolled in school at the age of five. He grew up in a milieu of poverty which, he later said, was 'so stark as to be almost unimaginable these days.' Toilets were in the yard; the family froze in winter and fried in summer. It was the usual fate of most Jewish immigrants in New York in 1902, when Hook was born.
Review, 4001 words
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