Customer Reviews

Real Life on Cannery Row: Real People, Places and Events That Inspired John Steinbeck

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I bought this book on a whim. So glad I did.
It is the most fascinating book and gives a REAL and OPEN view into the life and times of people characterised in Cannery Row.
This book truely makes Cannery Row come alive.
If you love the book or the movie, you absolutely have to buy this book!

This is a seminal piece of work on Cannery Row.

The author spent considerable time and effort to interview living persons from the era to validate events and explain the true-life connections that inspired John Steinbeck's writings of Cannery Row.

Readers and Cannery Row aficiondos will appreciate the numerous rare photographs as well as the author's notes and references throughout the book. Well done!

I'm one of the Cannery Row Steinbeck authorities that has been waiting for this book. Scrap Lundy's research on what's real and what isn't in John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" unravels decades of bad journalism, careless academic attention, and a mountain of conjecture and misinformation. With this book, one of Steinbeck's best (Steinbeck biographer, Jackson Benson, claims its his "hands down" favorite Steinbeck work), readers of his 1945 jewel can know and appreciate the background of its characters, the origins of actual places Steinbeck used in his "fiction"--as well as those real places and people cleverly manipulated for the sake of Steinbeck's world famous "Cannery Row."
This great little book is now the indispensable companion reader to John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row"--as valuable to the reader for the pleasure of John Steinbeck's art, as for the serious student or researcher on the subject. A Steinbeck collector's library is now incomplete without it.
--Michael K. Hemp, The History Company

If you always wanted more details about the basis for his tales of the Row, this will fill in some of those gaps with interesting information and pictures.
Puts you right on the spots.

I finally got around to reading John Steinbeck's Cannery Row last year. It's a nice book; but, what is really fascinating is learning that the characters in the book come from real life. See, John Steinbeck lived on or near the real Cannery Row for awhile, and he used the people he met in his book. This book, Real Life on Cannery Row compares the real people with the fictional characters of Steinbeck. Most of the people and many of the situations in the book came from real life. It is amazing to read what was real and what is fiction. This is a great and entertaining book in itself, with or without Steinbeck's book. Highly recommended.

Scrap Lundy's book places the people in Steinbeck's Monterey-based books in their actual context. As you read through the book you'll start nodding as you recognize the characters fleshed-out as real people. The book has pictures and aerial photos included which highlight the well-researched details.

Someday soon I'll return to Monterey with this book in hand and revisit those places where Doc, Mack, Dora and Lee Chong really lived and breathed. Of course, I'll don a leather jacket, brown Fedora and will my psyche back into the 40's. In short, a fantastic complement to Steinbeck's Monterey-based books.