“Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.”

This memoir by Russell Baker encourages readers to write their stories for the generation that hasn’t yet asked for them.  He shows us why he believes this: he will always regret not knowing better the person who told him how to see the world and his role in it. After his mother’s mind began to wander “free through time” he realizes what he had missed. He writes, “A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs” (13).

Russell Baker, Growing Up (New York: Signet, a division of Penguin Group, 1984), 13.