| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58. By Sherry B. Ortner. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. xvi, 340 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8223-3108-X.)

Sherry B. Ortner's New Jersey Dreaming explores the Weequahic High School class of 1958 to probe the intersection of social class structure and individual aspiration. Her focus is on a specific high school in New Jersey, but her commentary connects the local forces believably to larger national issues. Her book is no parochial study. The author incorporates a historical sensitivity to the American high school in the 1950s, a cauldron of social geography and memory, an experience tattooed in each mind because of the cultural power accorded the transition from childhood to adulthood. The mid-twentieth-century American high school compressed class and ethnic dynamics "into a single universe" (p. 41), confronting individuals with inherited identities, not always successfully, for both good and ill. Her book asks how her fellow Weequahic classmates viewed this experience during and after.

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