Synopses & Reviews
Cultural Writing. FOOL'S PARADISE presents the best writings of one of America's most incisive and influential thinkers on subjects from rainmakers to agribusiness, party politics to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. "I never lost a feeling for the importance of idealism in keeping alive the belief that injustices can be corrected and inequalities lessened." So wrote McWilliams, historian, journalist, activist, and iconoclast who chronicled the history of California and the West for a period of nearly sixty years. With an introduction by Gray Brechin and a forward by McWilliams' son, Wilson Carey McWilliams.
Synopsis
Carey McWilliams (1905-1980) -- lawyer, activist, historian, editor of The Nation for two decades -- wrote the history of California as no one else could, or would. Alternately scathing, amusing, and disturbing, his sharp and literate accounts shatter the myths meant to obscure the real workings of the state, revealing always the relationship between the exploited and those who would exploit them.
Readers will find that McWilliams's writing on history and the issues of his day is still relevant -- in fact, it is the basis for the field that we now call California studies