astrarium
Heidi J. De Vries

    home         archive         music       


b o o k s  

         


October 15, 2002
Packinghouse Daughter
Cheri Register
A Memoir. I could not have read Cheri Register's book at a more timely moment. Every morning on the way to work as my bus crossed the Bay Bridge I would raise my eyes from the pages of Packinghouse Daughter long enough to look at the veritable armada of container ships in the Bay waiting for some resolution to the lockout of the West Coast longshore workers by the Pacific Maritime Association. Flaming liberal that I am, it's not hard to guess where my loyalties lay in that particular dispute. When Register decided to tackle the story of the 1959 Albert Lea, Minnesota, meatpackers' strike, she was also willing to admit the prejudices she had due to the fact that her father was one of the meatpackers. After all, she was only an impressionable 14 at the time. However, the story she meticulously uncovers and records is truly one of hard-working men and women standing up to their company to ask for fair compensation for their labors and what happened when the company seemed unwilling to listen. She combines interviews with company representatives and strikers with her personal recollections of life in Albert Lea to create a wonderful testament to one town's working class.

The one irrevocable limitation is that we cannot go back to where we were. We must face the new horizons.
—Pearl S. Buck, quoted on the cover of the 1963 commencement program, Albert Lea High School



   



home >





09.05.03
The Baburnama
04.24.03
Tomorrow Now
04.14.03
The Fallen Curtain
04.07.03
The Gormenghast Novels
02.25.03
A Whistling Woman
01.31.03
A Free Range Childhood
01.20.03
The Mount
01.10.03
The Zine Yearbook, Volume IV
12.18.02
Coming out of the Woods
12.03.02
Susan Glaspell
11.13.02
Dr. Janson's New Vitamin Revolution
10.25.02
God at the Edge
10.15.02
Packinghouse Daughter
10.01.02
The Same Ax, Twice
09.12.02
Moral Hazard
09.09.02
One Degree West
08.29.02
Halflives
08.22.02
On Histories and Stories
08.12.02
The Minority Report
07.22.02
Storyville, USA
06.26.02
Zeitgeist
06.10.02
Spiritual Marketplace
05.22.02
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
05.10.02
Media Unlimited
04.26.02
Debating the Good Society
04.05.02
Against All Odds
03.21.02
Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks
03.08.02
Passage
01.30.02
Postmodern Pooh
01.21.02
Toil
01.08.02
Solitaire of Love
12.31.01
The Seventies Now
12.07.01
The Biographer's Tale
11.20.01
Anxious Intellects
10.29.01
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
10.10.01
Rare Birds
09.27.01
The Star Thrower
09.13.01
A Passion for Books
08.28.01
Sharpe's Eagle
08.16.01
The Greatest of Marlys
08.08.01
Sharpe's Rifles
07.26.01
The Charterhouse of Parma
07.04.01
Honky
06.28.01
Frisco Pigeon Mambo
06.25.01
Rimbaud
06.08.01
Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men
06.06.01
The Powerbook
06.04.01
Darkness in El Dorado
05.21.01
The House on Dream Street
05.15.01
Hollow City
05.10.01
The Years with Laura Diaz
04.25.01
Father of the Four Passages

www.astrarium.com   © 2002 Heidi J. De Vries. All rights reserved.