Customer Reviews

The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland (A Centennial Book)

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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.

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.

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.