Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man
The New Old West
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Frank Bergon’s astonishing portrayals of people in California’s San Joaquin Valley reveal a country where the culture of a vanishing West lives on in many twenty-first-century Westerners, despite the radical technological transformations around them. All are immigrants, migrants, their children, or their grandchildren whose lives intertwine with the author’s, including several races and ethnicities: Chicanos, Mexicans, African Americans, Italians, Asians, Native Americans, Scots-Irish descendants of Steinbeck’s Okies, and Basques of the author’s own heritage.
Bergon presents a powerful array of rural and small-town Westerners who often see themselves as part of a region and a way of life most Americans aren’t aware of or don’t understand, their voices unheard, their stories untold. In these essays, Westerners from the diverse heritage of the San Joaquin Valley include California’s legendary Fred Franzia, the maker of the world’s best-selling Charles Shaw wines dubbed “Two-Buck Chuck,” and Darrell Winfield, a Dust Bowl migrant and lifelong working cowboy who for more than thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man. Their voices help us understand the complexities of today’s rural West, where Old West values intersect with New West realities. This is the West (and America today)—a region in conflict with itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Bergon (Jesse's Ghost) uses his personal experience of growing up in California's San Joaquin Valley to frame this insightful, if overly discursive, take on the American West. Bergon breathes life into what could have been an academic argument that the West has always emphasized communal values and is often misrepresented as solely valuing individualism by devoting each chapter to a specific figure indicated by its title, such as "Black Ranch Girl," "Illegal Immigrant to Valley Farmer," or "Chicano Vet." He profiles his subjects both through his own friendships with many of them including lifelong working cowboy Darrell Winfield, whom he'd known since before Winfield was hired as the Marlboro Man in the late 1960s and through in-depth interviews. For example, Nancy Turner Gray, the "black ranch girl," reports on strands of both tolerance and prejudice in the Valley's multiracial culture during her '60s upbringing. In the best instances, Bergon's memories and interviews ground larger historical events, as in "A Valley Indian's Search for Roots," which explores the California Gold Rush through a Native American woman's research into her family history. At times, though, the individual details distract from Bergon's larger objectives, rendering this a book more effective as a collection of sketches than as a unified whole.
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