A look at what happened to the millions of people who headed west during the Great Depression to find jobs in California shows how one family rose from the life of itinerant fruit pickers into the middle class. Tour.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This deft, often spellbinding true story of the westward migration and upward mobility of an American farming family follows the plucky Tathums as they stagger across the 1930s American landscape from one hardscrabble hamlet to the next until reaching "Californy." In Fresno, they clamber up the social ladder--picking grapes, selling potatoes and furniture--managing to rise surprisingly high. Washington Post reporter Morgan ( Merchants of Grain ) skillfully evokes the post-Civil War South, the prairie, Oklahoma, pentecostal churches and sleepy, still-developing California, showing the Tathums getting rich and supporting ultra-conservative candidates and causes. His sympathetic portrait of members of the religious right compels respect for their hard work and values. But the book's second half never achieves the mythic resonance of the opening chapters, with their stirring depiction of a brave family riding a truck towards the unknown. Photos. BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Morgan ( Merchants of Grain , Viking, 1979), a journalist with the Washington Post , admits to a lifelong fascination with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath . In 1984, he set out to discover the people and countryside immortalized in Steinbeck's novel of Depression-era America. He discovered the Tathams and the Tacketts, two of the hundreds of families who, like the fictional Joads, joined the great "Okie" migration westward in the 1930s. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, Morgan chronicles the life stories of Oca Tatham and his descendants, who in less than half a century went from migrant fruit picking to middle-class prosperity in the promised land of California. The author tends to be wordy and the style tedious; but in the end both general readers and scholars in oral history and family studies will profit from this book. BOMC alternate.
- Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Kentucky Historical Soc., Frankfort
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Kentucky Historical Soc., Frankfort
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rising in the west, good history,
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This review is from: Rising In The West: The True Story Of An "Okie" Family from the Great Depression Through the Reagan Years (Hardcover)
Found this book to be very interesting. It's written about the 'Grapes of Wrath' period of California's history. It's easy reading and very informative.
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