Big Sugar marks the emergence as a major voice--

and with a major subject--of Alec wilkinson, al-

ready established as one of our most gifted young

writers, author of two aeclaimed books: Midnights: A

Year with the Wellfleet Police and Moonshine: A Life

in Pursuit of white Liquor~

His new book is a revelation of a largely unknown

American scandal: the brutal exploitation of migrant

West Indian cane cutters in south Florida by the big

sugar companies. Mad he depicts-- with a respect for

the particulars of human lives that transcends mere

expos6--the world that the cane cutters have made

as thev endure their perilous work and situation.

The story he tells is one of unapologetic exploita-

tion that seems to belong to an earlier time or to

another country, wilkinson describes in compelling

detail how the sugar cane is grown, and how it is

harvested--a job so dangerous, hot, exhausting, and

low-payiug that American workers will not accept it.

He tells how just forty-seven years ago the biggest of

the sugar growers, then employing Americans, was

indicted for slavery, and how, rather than reform its

practices, big sugar has sustained its vastly profitable

enterprise by replacing Americans with West In-

dians (mostly ,Jamaicans) imported seasonally, who

can silnply be shipped home if they do not do exactly

as they are told.

But Big Sugar is more than a record of exploita-

tion. wilkinson leads us to know the Florida towns

of Belle Glade and Clewiston, where the cutters are

barracked-little pieces of the Third World in the

United States--and the small islands of pleasure,

from taverns to brothels and enticingly stoeked

stores, that the eane cutters have found there.

Above all, we hear the voices of the cutters them-

selves as they reeount their lives and hardships. "We