Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida

by Alec Wilkinson

This book is a realistic documentary of the life of Florida's sugarcane workers. It is a realistic portrait of the poor immigrant workers who provide Florida sugar to consumers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Agriculture

263 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good look into a localized topic. When you grow up and live in Florida, you're aware of the sugar cane fields. But, unless you live near them, they're just an afterthought. This book does a great job painting the picture of what life as a cane cutter is like. And let me tell, it isn't great. You get a decent history of the sugar industry in Florida, and how it's another fine example of a major American industry exploiting and degrading the lives of men in the name of profit. Although the book is a little dated, I have a hard time imagining that conditions are any better, or the practices any more fair than they were in the late 80's. It's a good book, and has a place in any Florida history collection.

[Rob Smith, Jr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Big Sugar’ is an NPR type crying in his coffee about horrendous conditions of workers and just ignoring who they’re working for. If the businesses are so horrible to treat people this way, then why not give the reader at least some benefit of the doubt that the knowledge gained would still have us outraged as to the workers treatment. I read this 20 years ago and I’m wiser now and see through the effort to just rile up the crowd.

[Chazzbot · Rating 3 out of 5]

No doubt Wilkinson's expose carried more impact back in the early 1990's after it was published. The book contributed to a rising tide of awareness of the inhumane and illegal conditions to which the sugar corporations of South Florida were exposing their workers. For that contribution, the importance of Wilkinson's book must be recognized.

Though the text is now dated (the sugar corporations were taken to court and largely mechanized their operations around 1997), there are still many revelations here as to the extent of the exploitation the workers, many of them migrants, experienced. Wilkinson also chronicles the cover-up of the death of a young college student who was protesting the company's practices.

Wilkinson's book is an expansion of articles written for The New Yorker, and it reads like a long magazine essay. This is both good--because the text is generally engaging and incorporates a variety of voices, often presented in dialogic format--and bad. Wilkinson is clearly a student of New Journalism, which makes his book now less useful than it might be if it were written in a more straightforward style. The book contains no index, and the chapters shift between interviews with sugar cane workers, portraits of Wilkinson's observational interactions with the workers, and background information regarding the history of sugar production in South Florida. Again, this inconsistency in format makes for an engaging reading experience, but is not particularly helpful for readers seeking a more historically-minded chronicle.

If this was a more recent text, I would have rated it much more highly, but I imagine anyone reading it now is looking for information. That information is here, and it is devastating, but one must read the entire book to extract it. That said, I would recommend this to anyone unfamiliar with the history of sugar production in the U.S. It is a shamefully unheard story of how corporations get away (literally) with murder.

[Jeannie · Rating 2 out of 5]

He repeated himself so much throughout the book I kind of lost interest in the subject...still all in all I believe it was a good representation of this industry.