David Kyvig's Daily Life

Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940
David E. Kyvig’s Daily Life in the United States, is a book covering twenty years of time during the great depression, while exploring how they spent their days and how they were affected by popular culture throughout six regions including Indiana, New Mexico, Iowa Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. David Kyvig’s book, is an excellent social history which examines how usual people reacted to the big changes during what we call “The Great Depression” and the “prosperity” decades. In this book the authors stick out to examine what daily life was like for ordinary Americans in the 1920's and 1930’s while going through times like the great depression. This book also recognizes that distinctions in location,
In this book the author states, “By 1929, one in five families owned one while 27 million cars were on the road, in the driveway or parking lot, at the gas station or repair shop, or, increasingly, stuck in traffic.” This describes that automobiles were starting to be used everyday towards different things along the lines of transportation. Without the use of the automobiles, people weren’t able to get around to places as quickly as they could now. Another thing that the author did well on describing the way life was like for automobiles was when he stated, “Automobiles in particular transformed patterns of work for millions of Americans. The use of automobiles, together with that of their close relatives, tractors and trucks, created or markedly changed many jobs.” This describes that the use of automobiles changed jobs for Americans as they were able to get to their jobs faster, able to use more automobiles for their needs, and automobiles made the way people moved about the cities or regions they were
With all of his success in the book, there were some weak points that were brought up throughout. The point of the book was also hurt by Kyvig’s writing style. This means that the book was a bit dry and statistics heavy, especially in the first half of the book. Kyvig states in chapter one a bunch of statistics on life expectancy and population. Kyvig states in chapter one, "Average life expectancy was just over 53.6 years for men, 54.6 for women. Only 7.4 percent of the population was 60 or over, and a mare 4.6 percent had passed 65.” This is an example of how the author relied too heavily on statistics in the first half of the book as there are to many numbers in just a couple sentences of the book. Even though there are plenty of other examples to how the author used to many statistics, the first half of this book, mainly the first chapter is a lot about statistics and easily makes the reader bored as someone wouldn’t want to read a lot about statistics or