Off The Record

IF YOU BUY one book this year, the book you won’t go wrong paying cash money for is Frank Bardacke’s just released “Trampling Out The Vintage,” the first book I’ve read in years that lives up to every pre-release superlative applied to it. It got me right from the first page, and it’s been years since I read anything that has captured my scattered attentions so thoroughly as this history of the United Farm Workers, not that “history of the United Farm Workers” even begins to describe this riveting book’s fascinating contents. If Bardacke had introduced himself as Ishmael and proceeded to write in the first person we’d be talking about a novel right up there with Moby Dick. Trampling Out The Vintage is not only the best all-round book ever written about farm labor that I’m aware of, and I’ve read all of Carey McWilliams and the rest of the factories in the fields books, this one is the kind of true history that reads like a great novel, with a large cast of fascinating and often improbable characters, plus the first detailed descriptions of farm work ever written, and intimate portraits of large figures like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, the late Walter Reuther, the Kennedys, Chuck Diedrich and the so-called human potential movement, Catholic mysticism, campesino theater, and on and on. Everything related to this great movement is in this book, including it’s entirely readable history of farm labor struggle pre-dating Chavez. Bardacke, fluent in Spanish and a former farmworker himself, has devoted his life to Trampling Out The Vintage, and he really has achieved an absolute masterpiece, an accessible masterpiece, too, not a dry history that has you nodding off at the introduction (Bardacke’s intro is worth the price of admission by itself) and dead asleep a couple of pages in. If you think I’m wrong about it I’ll refund your purchase price.