Product Description

This marvelously evocative book by Stephen Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson--all natives of the Great Central Valley of California--is the first to explore in detail the rich natural and social history of the state's agricultural heartland.
Gerald Haslam's text celebrates the tenacious people of the Valley, where hard work and ingenuity are the means to both survival and success. This is land that gives little but yields, under pressure, to creative experiments with unusual crops. Stephen Johnson's and Robert Dawson's stunning photographs reveal the immense beauty of the region as well as the delicate relationship between the land and the people who work it.
The Central Valley is California's economic hub as well as its physical center. A plain some 430 miles long and up to 75 miles wide, surrounded by mountains and covering nearly fifteen million acres--about the size of England--this valley has become the richest farming region in the world. More than 25 percent of the table food produced in the U.S. is grown here. Its southernmost county, Kern, produces more oil than some OPEC countries.
The Valley is as rich in people as it is in resources. Tagalog, Hmong, Spanish, English, Cantonese, Russian, Italian--all are spoken here. The population of farm laborers, small family farms, powerful agribusinesses, and, increasingly, urban professionals make the region's economic disparities as palpable as its cultural diversity.
The Valley has also produced a wealth of writers--Maxine Hong Kingston from Stockton, Richard Rodriguez and Joan Didion from Sacramento, Gary Soto from Fresno, among others--as well as the award-winning El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers' Theater).
But the Valley is imperiled. The past 150 years of massive agricultural expansion and population growth have systematically destroyed much of the area's original wildlife, and the "plain of majestic oaks" seen by early travelers has vanished. The region is also plagued by a host of critical issues: chemical pollution, soil erosion, water politics, the treatment of minorities, economic inequities, farm foreclosures. Johnson's and Dawson's photographs--which are complemented by engravings by Thomas Moran, paintings by Albert Bierstadt and William Hahn, and photographs by Carleton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee, among others--bring home to us, as only visual images can, that it is up to us to safeguard the future of this endangered valley, to conserve its extraordinary human and natural wealth, and to try to reclaim some of its lost grandeur.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #135447 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

About the Author
Stephen Johnson teaches photography at Skyline College and the College of San Mateo. He edited and designed At Mono Lake (1983). Gerald Haslam is Professor of English at Sonoma State University and the author of That Constant Coyote: California Stories (1990) and Coming of Age in California (1990). Robert Dawson teaches photography at San Jose State University. His Robert Dawson Photographs appeared in 1988.

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous and informitive
I bought the book mainly to see the work of photographer Stephen Johnson, and his work truly delivered. These pictures are a must study for landscape photographers. His photographs capture a simple beauty and are a heartfelt display of the region. Also, I was pleasantly surprised by the work of photographer Robert Dawson, and by the amount of information contained within the pages of "The Great Central Valley". If you enjoy photography or are interested in California history, you will highly enjoy this book.

Stunning
THE GREAT CENTRAL VALLEY is a fat, heavy, glossy-paged book of photographs taken throughout the heart of California. Valley native Gerald Haslam, who has written extensively about this region, provides the text. The Table of Contents is:

Prologue
An Overview
Historical Patterns
The Delta
The Sacramento Valley
The San Joaquin Plain
The Tulare Basin
Some Issues
The Cusp of the Future
Epilogue
Exhibit Inventory
Sources
Index

I know of no book that more forcibly exudes the spirit, the voice, of the Great Central Valley, present through a photographic cornucupia, historical information and anecdote, regional knowledge, ecological data, and expertly written texts, all deeply humane in their display of people and landscapes joined in an ever-transforming heartland four hundred miles long and sixty wide.

Historical, not contemporary, material
The book contains mostly historical material -- photos and text. I was looking for a book about contemporary Central Valley. A one-page graph shows dollar-value of products and the percentage of U.S. production. One photo, of the planting of asparagus in a dust-storm, shows mostly dust.