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Title: Levittown
Subtitle: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb
Author: David Kushner
Narrator: Tavia Gilbert
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-30-10
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 15 votes
Genres: History, 20th Century
Publisher's Summary:
The dark side of the American dream: the true story of the first African-American family to move into the iconic suburb, Levittown, Pennsylvania.
In the decade after World War II , one entrepreneurial family helped thousands of people buy into the American dream of owning a home: The Levitts. William, Alfred, and their father, Abe, pooled their talents to create storybook towns with affordable little houses. They laid out the welcome mat - but not to everyone. Levittown had a whites-only policy.
The events that unfolded in Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the unseasonably hot summer of 1957 would rock the community. There, a white Jewish Communist family named Wechsler secretly arranged for a black family, the Myerses, to buy the pink house next door.
The explosive reaction would transform their lives, and the nation, leading to the downfall of a titan and the integration of the most famous suburb in the world. Levittown is a story of hope and fear, invention and rebellion, and the power that comes when ordinary people take an extraordinary stand. And it is as relevant today, more than 50 years later, as it was then.
Editorial Reviews:
Tavia Gilbert rises to the occasion with her reading of David Kushners Levittown. The cast of characters in this book runs from the well-known voice of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to anonymous, race-baiting residents of Levittown, PA, and scared adolescents on a witness stand. Gilbert gives voice and personality to the four individuals two married couples who rose from obscurity to fight a public battle and right a grievous wrong.
After World War II, thousands of veterans returned home to a massive housing shortage. Into that breach stepped Abraham Levitt and his two sons, the brash and boastful William and the quiet but equally ambitious Alfred. Levitt and sons envisioned a community of affordable homes, made so by taking advantage of assembly-line techniques perfected during wartime. The Levitts were prescient enough to create, own, and control most of the pre-fabricated housing elements from start to finish. It was a winning situation both for the Levitt men, who personified self-made American success, and for the revered, heroic vets who could, courtesy of the Levitts, also have a piece of the American Dream. Except for one thing: home ownership within Levittown was open to whites only.
Gilbert voices the quiet strength and resolute determination of the two couples who became the center of a cataclysmic struggle in Americas perfect community. Lew and Bea Wechsler, a Jewish and Communist couple from New York City, bought a small home in Levittown in search of more space and good schools for their two children. Bill and Daisy Myers, a college-educated African American couple with three young children Bill was also a veteran just wanted what the Wechslers and other Levittown homeowners had: their piece of the American Dream.
Trouble erupted as soon as the Myers family bought the home next door to their friends the Wechslers, whom they had met through their Civil Rights work. The racists bait the Myers and Wechsler families, the Wechslers become marginalized because of their work with the Communist Party, and the Myerses begin to doubt the wisdom of buying a home in Levittown. Gilberts performance allows listeners to become completely caught up in the experience.
