Books like World's Fair

Hope Is Where You Find ItDoctorow's World's Fair is, for me, an important document touching on family history. My mother was 11 years old when she visited Flushing Meadows in 1939 and it influenced her life as significantly as it did Doctorow's. Both he and his avatar 'Edgar' were two years younger than my mother. New York City was (and of course largely still is) a city of immigrants and the children of immigrants. In other words it is a place of constant dislocation and dissolution. It doesn't so much melt into a pot as anneal on a blacksmith's iron. But the depression of the 1930's added a component of desperation to the lives of many that is the stage set in which his protagonist functions. For Edgar the Worlds Fair is not just a glimpse of other worlds, but rather, as for my mother, the symbol of a hope for a new world. It was almost an excuse to feel good. Edgar's father with his failing business sees it expressly as that, in almost the same words I am sure my mother quoted to me from my grandfather. The experiences that affected Edgar most deeply weren't the visions of new technologies or urban designs but the 'trivial' encounters like the archly vulgar sideshow 'Oscar the Amorous Octopus'. For my mother it was the bank of valves that released small amounts of unusual fragrances. The one that stuck in her mind was labelled, she found only after testing it, Human Gas.