Readers seeking a full experience of John Steinbeck's literary style won't want to miss Harvest Gypsies, a selection of seven articles that Steinbeck wrote in 1936 about the plight of migrant farmworkers during the Dust Bowl migration. Black and white photos accompany his report on conditions and experiences, weaving a masterful selection of insights which go beyond history into personal observation.

Were the "Grapes of Wrath" published today, it may like other recent books, have been classified as historical fiction as opposed to a novel. I am thinking specifically of "Artemisia" that was published as both in different countries. How the work is classified is not critical, as either way it is one of the finest pieces of literature that has been written, and for many people, Steinbeck's finest work.

"The Harvest Gypsies" is a collection of 7 articles that Mr. Steinbeck wrote as a journalist. All were concerned with the issues he dealt with in the resulting book. This small volume is greatly enhanced by the photographs of Dorothea Lange, and the introduction of Charles Wollenberg.

One of the people the book was dedicated to was "Tom", actually Tom Collins, who was a manager of a federal migrant labor camp in California. The lines of fact and fiction are eventually blurred with him, as Tom Collins was the model for the character of "Jim Rawley" manager of "The Wheatpatch Camp" in "The Grapes Of Wrath". Ms. Lange's photographs could have been illustrations for Mr. Steinbeck's book, for when viewing them you can pick out the faces that could have accounted for the members of Steinbeck's epic.

This is a very brief book, but it portrays the migratory farm workers lives, as being even worse, if that can be imagined. A novel always offers the ultimate refuge of being fiction; these 7 articles and their photographs take away that solace. The brutality, random murder, and disease that was rampant, and the State of California that allowed the behaviors, are atrocious. In the context of one of the writings, one of the large growers who sanctioned the killing and starvation that was part of the agriculture industry stated that, "without a peon population the economy of California could not function". Steinbeck takes this statement of arrogance and ignorance, that is routinely spoken by any exploiter, and logically demonstrates that were this indeed the case, the state could no longer exist. For were it to continue to exist with its fascist policies, the most basic of Democratic rights would have to be absented.

Milk, that played so prominent a role in the book is spoken of extensively in the articles. Many of the most painful parts of the book were so common in reality, that the book may seem mild at times.

No matter how many times you have read the book, once this collection of articles are read, the experience of the book will not only change, I believe it will be enhanced.

Three of Steinbeck's social novels--In Dubious Battle, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men--are enhanced after reading this work. This work is the prelude to three of Steinbeck's most socially poweful novels. To fully understand what Steinbeck is striving to accomplish with Battle and Wrath, and to fully round out your history/literature lesson, it is essential to understand something about the socialist movement--birth of communisim--and the general exploitation of the fruit-pickers of California. The big businesses of that day, not much different from various big businesses of today, treated employees like machines--replacing them as needed--after being hurt on unsafe equipment, etc.--without regarding their well-being, or considering the hungry mouths of their families. The Harvest Gypsies is a crutial text in the study of California before uniouns began revolting against the machine.

Sure, you've probably seen the movie or had to read the book for a class. But you never really understood what the uproar was about - a relatively simple story, right?

This book helps you place the book in the perspective of whrn it was first published and why John Steinbeck's work has survived the test of time.

The book is divided into 3 parts - the first part deals with "The Grapes of Wrath" as a social document and the efforts to suppress or censor the book out of existence. The second part, much longer, deals with the book as a work of art and how the various elements in the book work together. The third part of the book offer an assessment of John Steinbeck's career and his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.

If you want to delve into the classic piece of work known as "The Grapes of Wrath", this book gives you some excellent insight how the world was when this book was first published. I recommend this book highly.

Sure, you've probably seen the movie or had to read the book for a class. But you never really understood what the uproar was about - a relatively simple story, right?

This book helps you place the book in the perspective of when it was first published and why John Steinbeck's work has survived the test of time.

The book is divided into 3 parts - the first part deals with "The Grapes of Wrath" as a social document and the efforts to suppress or censor the book out of existence. The second part, much longer, deals with the book as a work of art and how the various elements in the book work together. The third part of the book offer an assessment of John Steinbeck's career and his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.

If you want to delve into the classic piece of work known as "The Grapes of Wrath", this book gives you some excellent insight how the world was when this book was first published. I recommend this book highly.

Why this book hasn't been reprinted since it's first pressing in the early '80s is one of life's mysteries. The photos, illustrations, text and general concept are all brilliant. There isn't another book on the American road quite like this one.

Oh my. This book is wonderful. I have been a collector of postcards for 25 years of my hometown. I was just becoming interested in Roadside Americana (Gas Stations, Motels, Restaurants, and odd roadside attractions) from the 1920s to the early 1960s when I discovered Baeder's book in the 1980s. I bought it and immediately became addicted to Roadside postcards.
This book is out-of-print now, but if you ever have a chance of buying the book...- buy it!! And what a great artist Baeder is. Some of his Roadside paintings are in the book also.
j.k.

"The Great Monkey Trial" was begun in 1957, abandoned when the author learned of the imminent publication of Ray Ginger's "Six Days or Forever?" only to be eventually revived and published in 1968. Consequently, de Camp has the advantage of access to not only John T. Scopes' published memoirs, but the archives of the ACLU, newspaper files and published accounts, as well as correspondence and interviews with participants. The volume contains a handful of the colorful editorial cartoons published on the trial as well. "The Great Monkey Trial" remains the most detailed account of the Scopes Trial available (I say this as someone who did their dissertation on this particular event).

Not surprising, given his reputation as a writer of sword and sorcery novels, de Camp's writing style is the most distinctive aspect of his book. Guided by the recollections of those who had actually been in the Dayton courtroom in 1925, de Camp includes vocal inflections, facial expresions, gestures and movements, as well as various crowd comments and reactions. Consequently, de Camp breaths life into the trial transcript, a well as being able to add to the historical record such things as the comments lost in the commotion following the request by the defense to have William Jennings Bryan take the stand.

The chapter titles provide a decidedly military flavor to the story ("The Challenge," "The Crusade," "The Champion Falls," etc.). Although some of the chapter titles touch upon the religious nature of the conflict, overall they are fairly netural. However, de Camp's position is clearly revelaed in the choice of literary quotations at the start of each chapter. For "Single Combat," the chapter detailing the cross-examination of Bryan by Clarence Darrow, de Camp's quotation is from "Alice Through the Looking Glass," where the White Queen tells Alice, "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." This certainly has significant rhetorical implications, coloring our reading of Bryan's answers to Darrow's questions.

Ultimately de Camp succeeds in both replicating the ridicule associated with the trial by detailing the circus atmosphere and to legitimate the legacy of ridicule. Although he does avoid taking "an extreme position," de Camp's subtle approach proved just as effective in its time and place as the barbs offered by Darrow and H.L. Mencken during the trial. Perhaps equally important, de Camp's literate retelling of the trial made another detailed examination, or critical assessment, superfluous.

Aside from telling the facts of the famous trial, the author gives the reader a wonderful account of the reason the trial happened, its effects, the birth and decline of the Adamist movement, sketches of all major (and minor) players in the trial and plenty of humorous anecdotes! This is a book you can spend hours soaking up and dip into at almost any time. L. Sprague deCamp writes in an amused and witty style which is a joy to read. All the same, he never forgets that he is telling the story of the attempts of ignorance and fear to blot out knowledge and truth in this country. He treats all the players as human beings but never wavers in his stern condemnation of the prosecution. I urge all intelligent people who care about freedom to read this book!

One of the best journals of the early gold rush that includes a series of letters written by Doble before and during the Civil War. Poor spelling, no punctuation as Doble recorded his day-to-day experiences as a miner. His descriptions of life and times, of bonanza and borrasca, of the wagon trains arriving, and especially his description of his cabin, are classic. I have lived in Volcano, and spent many hours searching out the places described. After reading of his anguish over the death of his good friend, I went to the cemetery and found the tombstone placed there by him.

Living history as many of the places described in the book remain, but written from a perspective long lost.

My father and I got excited when we ran across this book documenting the exploits of John Doble in the gold country of Pine Grove, California.

Doble's Journal documents his search for gold specifically in the Pine Grove, Jackson areas. One could take this journal and retrace Doble's steps to find the best areas to prospect.

I definitly would add this one to my prospecting reference library.

Just as much as the Acropolis was the religious center of ancient Athens, the Agora was its commercial, governmental, and cultural heart. Camp and Renfrew's book finally gives this crucial site the attention and analysis it deserves.

The authors draw on the results of over a half-century of archaeological investigation to relate 1500 years of the city's history. From Athens' rise from obscurity in the days of Homer to its flowering as a military/cultural powerhouse in the 5th century, to the Hellenistic Age and the days of the Roman Empire, to the city's slow decline to the status of Byzantine backwater, this book reveals the evolution of the Agora in hundreds of color and black-and-white illustrations which truly breathe life into the ancient stones and the people who knew them.

The illustrations are sumptuous, and are the true centerpiece of the book. Scores of photographs illustrate the surviving walls and foundations of the Agora's buildings, and careful, clearly-rendered site plans and architectural elevations enable the reader to readily relate disparate elements of the structures and artifacts to their historical and cultural contexts. Accompanying the illustrations is a clear and lucid text which explains the history and the society that the Agora reflected and served.

I heartily recommend this book to those interested in archaeology, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, and urban planning. Echoing Peter Green's review, it's difficult to conceive that this book could have been done any better, and it is unlikely to be superseded for the foreseeable future.

I am so glad that this book was translated to english and published here in the States. Please, don't get me wrong, but it is "nice" to have a book about other victims of the Nazi death camps besides Jewish accounts. It serves to remind us and teach us that others too were sentenced to those Death Camps. Many gypsies, resisters, communists, christians, and lesbians, all from different countries, EVEN GERMANS, were sentenced and died at the camps. This book in particular is a Who's Who, a list of a convoy of resisters (mostly communists) from France (mostly french, but there were other nationalities as well) who lived and died together. Each name has a story, some more than others. Stories from the survivors and from what relatives that could be found after the war.

It's amazing that this book was first published in 1965 and is only now being published here in the US. But I'm glad I got to read it.

John Herman has done a A+ job at Deep Waters. A thrilling book from cover to cover, it will have you on the edge of your seat. I recommend it to any teenager. Its a story about friendship, camp, and everything else about teenagers. You will surely relate to it from the beginning and to the end, all 198 pages. Surely a 5 star novel.

The collaborative editorial skills of Jack Bemporad, John T. Pawlikowski, and Joseph Sievers has rendered Good And Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications For Today into an essential body of work that is a "must" for all serious Holocaust Studies reading lists and reference collections. The contributing essays are drawn from papers presented at an extraordinary symposium convened at the Vatican in 1998 and represents the view of more than thirty of the world's foremost theology and religious thinkers on the inescapable moral question of how, if at all, believers can reconcile their faith in a just and merciful god with the phenomena of the deliberate mass murder of millions of men, women and children during the Holocaust. Included is an interview with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and excerpts from the writings of Moshe Flinker, Etty Hillesum, and Dietrich Bonhoffer.

It took me twenty years to finally pull Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Shosha, about Jews and the Holocaust from my bookcase and read it. One week later I had finished it and moved on to read Clifford's Blues. Two compelling and distinctive plys coil together to offer up complementary perspectives on the rise of Nazism in Germany. Singer puts a face on pre-World War II European Jews, richly depicting what it meant to be a Jew in western Europe in the years prior to and during the Holocaust. For most modern Americans this is a fairly familiar story.

Williams offers up a tale much less familiar. He introduces us to Clifford Pepperidge, a gay, black, American jazz musician who spends a dozen years incarcerated in Dachau prison, one of the many labeled undesirables who were captured as the Nazis rose to power. While other prisoners suffer the misery of prison barracks and captor abuse, Clifford sits in the comfortable home of a gay Nazi officer and his bovine German wife. There as a servant, Pepperidge allows himself to be used sexually and musically by both husband and wife, the price of survival. In his daily interaction with other prisoners he sees that good men, those with the character and ethics to stand up for their fellows, rarely survive long. It is those who capitulate, who sink down into the muck, who lose their humanity who will endure.

Williams provides us with a fascinating picture of how people react to power and influence, even when it clearly is evil. We see the German burger who blinds himself to the fate of those caught up in the hungry trap of Nazism. The German officer who grasps at every opportunity to accumulate wealth and power. The many who stumbled forward in step with a horror that grows ever larger and more malignant. Where Singer presents a picture of people desperately trying to hold onto their hopes and dreams even in the face of rising oppression, Williams shows us the convolutions that strip away humanity in both victim and oppressor.

The writing is strong, and Williams clearly took the time to do the necesary research to bring his story to life. Richly developed characters hold the reader's interest. It is not a book to be quickly forgotten. Williams holds a mirror up and asks us to look at ourselves and think about how we can be shaped and influenced by people and events. His darkside tale underscores the possibility of our own tumble in inhumanity and evil.

I read this book a year ago and it haunts me still.

John A. Williams has crafted here a story so compelling, so engrossing in its depiction of life lived on a razor's edge, that you loathe putting it down; you may feel chills when you've finished it. It's that disturbing, and that good. CLIFFORD'S BLUES affirms that Williams retains his gifts (fresh as ever in his mid-70s!) and mastery of his craft.

Clifford Pepperidge is triple-crossed: condemned as "decadent" - for being American Negro, jazz musician, and active homosexual (especially impolitic when he's caught in bed with a prominent white man) - and interned "indefinitely" in a German concentration camp by Nazidom as it rises to power in the early 1930s.

This is a historical possibility we'd not thought of. Yet Williams, no stranger to historical fiction (see, for example, his novel CAPTAIN BLACKMAN), footnotes his text with incidences of real life black jazz musicians detained by the Nazis prior to the outbreak of World War II; I'd never heard about this.

John A. Williams has been publishing books, mostly novels, over 40 years. His heroes have tended to be "manly" black men: uncompromising, heterosexual, hard-loving, hard-drinking and cigarette-smoking urbane sophisticates. I've always taken them to be stand-ins for the author himself; perhaps they represent the image of manliness of a day not quite gone by.

Stepping out of his usual bounds and into Clifford's skin, however, Williams exhibits an even greater sense of manhood, an empathetic virility. Clifford may not fathom how he managed to get himself into such a mess, but he doesn't make excuses. He's as resolute about his sexuality as his racial and artistic makeup, though all combine to make him particularly alienated - and vulnerable - as he faces down brutal imprisonment with other Nazi-dictated "undesirables" (Communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and gypsies) for twelve long years. He lives to see, almost veritably, the walls of his dungeon shake, practical escape, the possible passing on of his testimony - but at what cost?

I can say, with modesty and with pride, that I've read all John A. Williams' published novels. This is, for my money, his most powerful, arguably his greatest book since THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM.

Williams has always been a thinking person's writer and a darn good storyteller. In this extremely well written and deeply felt book he's rendered the poignant story of a character he made me truly care about. Clifford Pepperidge could be the long-feared-lost-or-dead relative whose tattered diary of surviving hell on earth has just been plopped down in your living room. How can you embrace all of what he's been through? What if it were you? The really eerie question is that, given history, or the record of human events, it's apparent that no one has a corner on inhumane depravity - we're each just as likely or capable of being captor or captive when, if, we allow a new holocaust. But when you look in the mirror, do you recognize the humanity within and extending beyond yourself? Will we remember?

If only half of what is published were half as well crafted. By the way, the Kirkus Review at the top says this is Williams's first novel. But this is John A., the author of The Man Who Cried I Am, right? Does Kirkus have him confused with another John Williams?