THE OTHER CALIFORNIA: The Great Central Valley...
THE OTHER CALIFORNIA: The Great Central Valley in Life and Letters by Gerald Haslam (University of Nevada Press: $11.95; 221 pps.). For many Californians, the state consists of the cities of the Southern Coast and San Francisco Bay. But the vast Central Valley contains some of the most fertile farmland in the world: The value of its annual agricultural yield exceeds the total value of all the gold mined in the state since 1848. Haslam’s low-key essays explore a variety of topics, from the pleasures of growing up in Oildale to the threats posed by the depletion of the water table. In one striking piece, he shows that the same pejorative terms used to describe foreign immigrants today were applied to the Midwesterners who arrived during the Dust Bowl.
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