Daniel O’Connell and Scott Peters have produced a book as extraordinary in style as in substance. They present detailed accounts of eight scholar-activists and organizers who have struggled to understand and expose the diverse impacts of agribusiness on California communities. But O’Connell and Peters do this by giving voice to their eight narrators—and the result reveals a power of voice that is at once striking and moving, accessible and generous, displaying a continuing commitment and conviction that is at once instructive and inspiring. The “damning indictment of the greed and corruption that flourish under California’s system of industrial agriculture” (3) that follows grows not from any summary arguments of the authors but from the decades of grounded, engaged research, legislative testimonies, scholarly books and investigative reporting identified in the practices of these narrators, key actors “in the struggle.” The massive inequalities they portray may nevertheless not surprise readers, even as...

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