An Hour Before Daylight

This is a book about a tiny town in Georgia where nothing happened. But it really is a book about humanity, and families, which we all come from. So many moving things about this book...a man who is president still calls his father daddy. What is so striking is the simple goodness of the people in Plains. To people of today, it was a dull place, but exciting to those who lived there.

Absorbing book about life in the South during the Depression era-- including good relationships among blacks and whites who lived in farming communities. The work ethic was admirable and most people in the Carter family seemed to be happy, with little complaining. Jimmy Carter as a child during this time, learned many lessons which helped when he entered into the political arena.

This is the book that every baby boomer and Generation X-er should be required to read. Jimmy Carter provides a wonderfully vivid tale of southern rural depression life. The Carters and their neighbors were, by today's standard, fairly poor. They lived off the land, went barefoot most of the time, had no air conditioning and television. When they needed to go to town, most of the time their feet was the mode of transportation. As a child, the future president sold boiled peanuts on the streets of Plains, Ga,. He picked cotton, slaughtered hogs, milked cows, plowed fields, ate possum. In short, Jimmy Carter's early life was a hard one. Relatively speaking, however, the Carter's were wealthy, especially when compared to the destitute black sharecroppers and day workers who farmed their land.Carter's beautifully written book should serve as a reminder to us all how easy it is to take life's 21st Century comforts for granted and how soft and privileged the American middle class really is. He helped me understand the world in which my father grew up and also made me proud of my country that someone with the humble beginnings of a Jimmy Carter could still be elected president.

This is a book about Jimmy Carter's boyhood in rural Georgia during the years of the Great Depression, the entirety of which took place during the years of the first three Roosevelt administrations, although it is usually blamed upon Herbert Hoover, who preceded him in office.I am a lifelong Republican, and rarely find anything to like about a prominent Democrat--particularly a Democrat president-- but I must admit to a strong liking for Jimmy Carter. He was, very apparently, a thoroughly decent man and it shows in this book. Perhaps I like him because his background is so similar to my own, although his was in rural Georgia--the son of a farmer--while mine was in Oregon--the son of a logger. And also the life he describes would not have been considered upper middle class in Oregon, as he suggest it was in Georgia, but rather lower down the scale.His description of the details of life seems absolutely accurate, for the last generation to grow to adulthood without the benefits(?) of television.One of the very interesting incidents he tells about is an uncle in the Navy who was stationed on Guam at the outbreak of the war, and was subsequently captured by the Japanese. His beautiful wife and two children left their home in San Francisco to stay with the Carters in Plains, where she received word that her husband had died in captivity. So, she returned to San Francisco where eventually she re-married.But, her husband had not died, although he was half-starved and had lost 100 pounds.. After the war he returned home. When she discovered that he still lived, his wife immediately had her marriage annulled, but the Carter women persuaded him, in his diminished state, that she had committed adultery (by re-marrying) and so he divorced her. Carter tells the story without judgmental comment.During the Depression we lived under similar conditions to those he describes: I've lived in houses without indoor plumbing or electricity, where we used the Sears & Roebuck catalog for toilet paper in the outhouse, as did he. We are of a similar age, and many of the conditions he describes were endemic in the United States at that time.He describes one of the early moves of the Roosevelt administration-to plow under a quarter of the cotton crop, and kill and burn 200,000 young hogs (shoats) in order to raise prices, at a time when huge numbers of people were starving. His father, a Democrat, never forgave Roosevelt for that policy, and never again voted for him. Nor did he ever like the "New Deal." Mr. Carter also discusses other inequities and difficulties with the federal bureaucracy as it incrementally intruded into private citizens' lives, but, again, non-judgmentally. But, mainly this book is not about politics. It is about a young boy, and young man, growing up in the rural South at a time before racial animosities were stirred up, but while a definite class system existed and the only class lower than the blacks in the South (where I also lived

Jimmy Carter's account of his early days in Depression Days farm country of Southwest Georgia parallels closely the experience of my wife, who grew up not too far from Plains. "Did you have 'kit fish' for breakfast?" I asked. "We didn't call it kit fish but salted fish with grits was a favorite at our breakfast table, ... and was it GOOD!" Sitting in a porch swing hung from the ceiling, talking with family and friends rocking in rocking chairs on the ample front porch watching the passing scene was a pleasant part of her early days.And as Jimmy Carter continues, floods of familiar memories course through one's mind. Those bittersweet days of youth are with us again. Even today vestiges of that long gone time retain their marks on the society of that region today.President Carter does us the service of recording the scene for our children to share their invisible roots in a time long gone. He is an outstanding storyteller. His book is a pleasure.

I couldn't put it down...What a remarkable life Jimmy Carter has led, and what rough times people had during the Depression. I really enjoyed other books by Jimmy Carter, but I think this one is my favorite. I'm very glad he became President of the U.S....he is a man of character.