Customer Reviews

The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California

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The Conquest of Bread will make compelling reading for anyone interested in California and its history, the history of agriculture, or simply how society works. For Walker, the answers are not to be found in the intersects of supply and demand curves and neo-liberal theory, supposedly applicable to every time and place, but rather in how particular classes, groups, and social forces have come together over the last 150 years to produce California agribusiness, a social phenomenon as staggering in its success and productivity as it is in its levels of human exploitation and environmental degradation.

Here is an educated man, isolated from peer review, re-warming ancient, pointless Populist ideas about a subject he knows only by association. Without the bulwark of tenure, he could have been challenged to have written something less formulaic and outdated.
What is more the pity is that he cares about his subject; he is just not used to having to defend his ideas, so he just comes off as a boring, monomoniacal old professor. One without an editor.