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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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