At one AM (apparently in search of lost praise), I found the best book review I ever received. I first signed a book contract with New Republic Books in 1975 promising to deliver in less than a year. It was to be my first published book--as it turned out it was my third. My agent Marie Rodell who had taken me on as a client back in 1969 (shortly after graduating from Columbia College) explaining that she saw promise in my talent. Finally, Marie was delighted that my wandering from hither (The Village Voice) to yon (a newsletter on migrant agricultural workers), perhaps my promise might be warranted.
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More than 10 years after signing the contract with New Republic Books, Marie’s successor Frances Collin arranged for the book to be moved to Sierra Club Books where it was finally published. The Los Angeles Times reviewed The Politics of Food on the first page of its book section.
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-26/books/bk-0_1_farm-bill
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Marie had represented Rachel Carson. A significant development in creating the environmental movement took place after Marie arranged for The New Yorker to publish Silent Spring. Rachel Carson biographers referred to Marie as Carson’s indispensable alter ego.
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Wishful thinking
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office (a machine gun nest poised to protect him), 25 percent of Americans lived in rural America. The dream of a secure agriculture base (shades of Thomas Jefferson) might have been realized. However, by the 1970s when U.S. farm population was less than five percent, reality took a back seat to wishful thinking.
“Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the RA/FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, among others) were assigned to document small-town life and to demonstrate how the federal government was attempting to improve the lot of rural communities during the Depression. Evans, however, worked with little concern for the ideological agenda or the suggested itineraries and instead answered a personal need to distill the essence of American life from the simple and the ordinary. His photographs of roadside architecture, rural churches, small-town barbers, and cemeteries reveal a deep respect for the neglected traditions of the common man and secured his reputation as America’s preeminent documentarian. From their first appearance in magazines and books in the late 1930s, these direct, iconic images entered the public’s collective consciousness and are now deeply embedded in the nation’s shared visual history of the Depression.”
—http://metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm
The beneficiaries of this deceit were rich farmers who tilled their multi-thousand acres from planes dropping seed and fertilizer on their crops hiring lobbyists to emit the magic phrase “family farm” (code phrase for greed).
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