Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the Thirties

The author and her husband, Hermann Brunck, an economist, were fervently devoted members of the U.S. Communist Party during the Depression. Their political experiences in New York City and Washington, D.C., are interesting, but the dominant theme of this haunting memoir is Davis's struggle to keep her husband in touch with reality. Party responsibilities combined with ominous happenings in the Soviet Union (Stalin's show trials, mass starvation, the Nazi-Soviet pact) triggered Brunck's mental deterioration and suicide attempts. Davis committed him to a sanatorium but disputes arose with the doctor in charge, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a Freudian analyst who did not approve of insulin shock therapy. Brunck eventually killed himself. Davis, who is now in her 90s and teaches writing at the Radcliffe Seminars at Harvard, also spent years agonizing over her disillusionnment with the party. An elegantly written, intimate book. (Nov.)