Seymour Chatman's book is an elegantly written and masterful guide to the films of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most under-appreciated directors. With clear and graceful prose that appeals to the general reader, Chatman interprets Michelangelo Antonioni's visionary perspective and the cinematic form of his themes and concerns, making the films of this sometimes difficult director comprehensible. This is no small trick, given the "sophisticated ambiguity, the "mysteries without resolution," and the tone of ennui that run throughout Antonioni's films, expressing a painful existential awareness. Illustrated throughout with breath-taking signature and never-before-seen images hand-picked from Antonioni's personal collection with the help of Paul Duncan, and with superb production by Taschen, Chatman's book draws the reader deeply into Antonioni's world, a world that sabotages conventional morality and the social order. Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, Chatman is the author of many scholarly books on narrative technique as well as writers such as Henry James. His sophisticated understanding of Antonioni's cinema was earlier displayed in his scholarly book Antonioni Or The Surface of the World.

In American Scream, Jonah Raskin, a professor at Sonoma State who has previously written on the life and times of Abbie Hoffman and of B. Traven, reminds us that Ginsberg's reading of "Howl" in San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955 created a "poetickall Bomshell" that resounded throughout the late fifties and sixties and later. In this fascinating and very readable text, Raskin paints a vivid portrait of the Beat Generation and its most outrageous and electrifying poet. With the use of diaries, newly released letters, and psychiatric reports, Raskin argues that Ginsberg's self-proclaimed "outsider" status as Jew, homosexual, and son of a mad mother informed his creative impulse. Ginsberg wrote from the margins, expressing the state of the nation and the mental state of many of the contemporary poets, writers, and misfits who felt themselves out of sync with the growing conformity, paranoia, and materialism of the post-World War II era, in a poetry that reverberated through much of the second half of the twentieth century.

We're all familiar with the name "Audubon," but not many of us know much about the man behind the famous set of beautiful, lifelike drawings and engravings in The Birds of America. In the first new biography of Audubon in forty years, Richard Rhodes succeeds beautifully at rectifying this ignorance, showing us that John Audubon was an early American who succeeded in inventing himself even as he invented the technique of chronicling and portraying the birds of America. A French immigrant to America in 1813, Audubon was sent here by his father to avoid conscription into the Napoleonic army. He arrived when the United States was hardly older than he was and the population was a mere six million people, two-thirds of whom were settled within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Audubon's quest in search of the birds of an uncharted continent took him deeper and deeper into unexplored territory, beginning on a flatboat down the Ohio River into Kentucky and later into the wildernesses of the South, Midwest, and West. Audubon's eventual success in artistically portraying life-like three-dimensional birds despite repeated business and financial failures is an archetypal story of 'making it' in America. This well-researched and well-written portrait of Audubon and his era is one more spectacular achievement for Rhodes, who is the author of twenty books and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in History for The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

California farms grow more than half of America's fruits and vegetables on three percent of the nation's farmland. In Beasts of the Field, the first of a projected three-volume set covering the history of California farmworkers, Richard S. Street, eminent historian and photographer, tells us, and in Photographing Farmworkers in California, shows us, the history of the farm laborers who have planted, nourished and harvested the enormous riches wrung from California land. Together these two books fully describe the legal, economic, political, managerial and environmental struggles of the migrant men, women and children who have worked the California soil, sharing backbreaking work and scorching sun and often slum-like working conditions. Beasts of the Field is a masterfully crafted, comprehensive, in-depth, well-researched and moving history of the successive waves of Native Americans and Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants who have worked the California land to such phenomenal success and who have most often been exploited in the process. Photographing Farmworkers in California is a stunning visual companion to Beasts of the Field. The photographs, which range over the past century and include a few of Street's own, are sensitively selected and movingly illuminated by Street's eloquent commentary and are the perfect visual illustration of Beasts of the Field. In combination, these two books are a moving tribute to the California farmworker and a monumental scholarly achievement, destined to become the benchmark work for anyone even remotely interested in the history of California agriculture.  

A good complement to Richard Steven Street's Beasts of the Field, Richard Walker's book uses a wide-angle lens to give an extraordinary overview of California's astonishingly successful, giant, agribusiness system of food production. The Conquest of Bread takes its title from a visionary social revolutionary tract by a late-nineteenth-century Russian anarchist and explores how the goal of providing enough food for everyone has ironically not been accomplished by communitarian means but rather by a vast capitalist system that depends on hired workers rather than family farmers. California agriculture now produces more than a third of the food eaten by all Americans, and California is the most fecund agricultural landscape on earth. Walker clearly delineates the components of this huge industry: capitalists and landowners and growers; industrial machines; chemical companies; biotechnology; distributors and marketers; farm laborers; and of course, beneath them all, the land itself. A geographer as well as a historian, Walker elucidates the environmental dimensions of this food production system as well as its economic and industrial features. On the one hand, he says, "we have one of the greatest agricultural systems in the world." On the other hand, he explains, this system has led to epic environmental degradation and ferocious exploitation of human labor. Eminently readable, clear, and full of nuance, The Conquest of Bread is an eye opener for anyone interested in understanding the process that brings our food from the land to the table and in so doing changes the land itself.