In today’s Los Angeles Times, Mark Arax explores two rich companion books on California’s vast farm belt: Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 and Photographing Farmworkers in California. Both are by Richard Steven Street and published by Stanford University Press. “Instead of shouting his moral indignation at the lot of farmworkers, Street builds his case pound for pound with an assiduous weighing of the facts,” writes Arax. “He does so with language that may not be lyrical but serves his chronological narrative well, giving a voice to those who have always appeared to us hidden under hats, muffled in bandanas, backs to the sun, hands in the earth.”
Also in Sunday’s LAT Book Review, Kevin Starr reviews Don Waldie’s Where We Are Now: Notes From Los Angeles. Read the review (registration required).
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Andrew Sean Greer, a San Francisco novelist whose latest book, 
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