A solid work of labor history that offers valuable lessons for other activists and organizers.
A scholarly study of an effort by Florida farmworkers to improve working conditions by building partnerships along the supply chain.
In the United States, the majority of consumers give little thought to where their food comes from. On that score alone, Marquis (Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operation Forces, 1997), vice president of innovation for the RAND Corporation, does good service with this exploration of labor organization in the tomato fields of Florida. Picking produce is a skilled trade; one of the author’s interviewees, former NFL star Edgerrin James, got essential training in the watermelon patches, where workers throw 20-pound fruits like giant footballs. “Thousands of times a day they must pitch melons to another worker up to ten feet away,” Marquis notes, all the while judging which ones are ready to harvest and without breaking any—and all for 16 hours per day. The growers relied first on African-American and then Latino immigrant labor, fueled by traffickers in undocumented and homeless workers, all without giving much thought to health and safety. In response, and against the odds, the field workers carefully organized over the last two decades; as they did, they transformed important aspects of the industry. Said one grower at first, “the tractor doesn’t tell me how to run my farm,” a sentiment that explains the book’s title. In time, however, most producers willingly signed on to the Fair Food Program and other accords, and with them large-scale outlets such as Whole Foods and McDonald’s. The former has been enthusiastic about the Campaign for Fair Food, while, as Marquis notes, many fast-food purveyors profess interest in so-called social responsibility but in practice have been reluctant “to be held responsible for what was going on several levels below in the supply chain.” The author writes accessibly about the workers’ long struggle, though the narrative sometimes slows when dealing with the complex negotiations—understandably, precisely because they are so complex.
A solid work of labor history that offers valuable lessons for other activists and organizers.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5017-1308-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: ILR Press/Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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