OSCAR LEWIS

Estudio antropológico social que explora la vida cotidiana de una familia de clase baja trabajadora en los años cincuenta y sesenta, mostrando las historias de vida de los miembros de la familia, quienes narran las dificultades de vivir en una ciudad inmersa en profundos cambios economicos y sociales, una Ciudad de Mexico no tan diferente a la de nuestros dias.

Here for the first time is told in a single volume one of the most remarkable stories in American history. An Eastener is never long in California without hearing something of the big four: four Sacramento shopkeepersCollis P. Huntington, Lelan Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crockerwho got control of the newly organized Central Pacific Railroad property. These men are portrayed in Mr. Lewiss volume vividly and with a great wealth or pertinent anecdote. Thus their true characters are revealed and the grandiose era in which they lived and operated is re-created as well. Huntington, the shrewd manipulator and lobbyist in Washington, founded the great fortune which is responsible for the magnificent library at San Marino; Leland Stanford, Governor of California and United States Senator, created Leland Stanford Junior University; Hopkins, the cold, quiet watchdog of the railroads treasury, kept himself out of the limelight, out of politics and scandal, yet, like the others, died enormously wealthy; while Crocker founded a dynasty of bankers still important in the affairs of California and the nation. Oscar Lewis, a longtime authority on Californiana and secretary of the Book Club of California, spent six years gathering the material for The Big Four and writing it. The result is a definitive telling of a story that is ever fresh and ever fascinating.

Sea Routes to the Gold Fields tells the story of one of the most exciting mass movements in history: the migration by sea of the tens of thousands who joined the headlong race to Californias newly discovered gold fields. This work fills an important gap in the literature of the Gold Rush, for while numerous books have been written about those who traveled overland to California, this is the first to give a comprehensive picture of the other half of the migration, of those Argonauts who made the journey in the slow, tiny, and incredibly crowded sailing ships and steamers of a century ago. It presents a colorful, varied, and extremely interesting picture of life on the gold ships during the months-long voyages, of the emigrants accommodations, food, and recreations, of their intermediate stops en route, and of what befell those who made the isthmian crossings at Panama or Nicaragua. Based mainly on the diaries and letters of pioneers who made the journey between 1849 and 1852, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields is a fascinating record of one of the most dramatic episodes in the nations history.

Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewiss fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who led strangely fascinating lives. John W. Mackay (the father of Clarence Mackay), best known of the four, built up the Postal Telegraph and Commercial Cable systems. His wife, Marie Hungerford, for years after her marriage saw little of America, but kept the society of Paris and London agog. James G. Fair was a master mechanic and one of the shrewdest of financiersof all the Comstocks conspicuous figures easily the least admired, a fact of which he was aware and which he regarded with complete indifference. He became a United State Senator and his elder daughter, Tessie, married Herman Oelrichs, then a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor and member of the prominent New York and Newport family. James Clair Floods great mansion atop Nob Hill in San Francisco is now the Pacific Union Club. William S. OBrien, Floods partner, was the most shadowy of the quartet.Its a rich field that Mr. Lewis has mined, and his story, which never lags, is set against the stunning background of the Virginia City of the seventies as well as the San Francisco of that era. The result is a really magnificent piece of authentic Americana.

Edición conmemorativa de los 50 años de la primera edición de Los hijos de Sánchez. Este volumen incluirá, además, Una muerte en la familia Sánchez, otra de las obras más representativas de Oscar Lewis y que sirve de continuacion a la primera.

A pioneering work from a visionary anthropologist, The Children of Sanchez is hailed around the world as a watershed achievement in the study of povertya uniquely intimate investigation, as poignant today as when it was first published. It is the epic story of the Sanchez family, told entirely by its membersJesus, the 50-year-old patriarch, and his four adult childrenas their lives unfold in the Mexico City slum they call home. Weaving together their extraordinary personal narratives, Oscar Lewis creates a sympathetic but ultimately tragic portrait that is at once harrowing and humane, mystifying and moving. An invaluable document, full of verve and pathos, The Children of Sanchez reads like the best of fiction, with the added impact that it is all, undeniably, true.