|
 |
| |
|
|
| |
Reviews
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Big Cotton
|
|
|
| |
How A Humble Fiber Created
Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put
America on the Map
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
| Washington Post |
|
| With wit and intelligence, Yafa demonstrates how a good deal of history can be learned by following a single thread...- Ira Berlin,Washington Post Read Full Review |
| |
|
| Wall
Street Journal |
|
|
| Chambray is an indigo-dyed,
plain-cotton weave often used in shirts
and womenswear. Chintz is a plain-weave
fabric with a lustrous finish. Cretonne
is a printed fabric, heavier than chintz.
Got that?
Good. Because you need to understand
cotton if you are going to understand
the world, and I don't mean only the
modern world, where nothing gets between
Brooke Shields and her Calvins. I
mean the ancient world, too, and colonial
America and the industrializing world,
to say nothing of the fashion world,
because before he is done, Stephen
Yafa, the author of "Big Cotton" (Viking,
398 pages, $25.95) has a lot to say
about all of them.
Mr. Yafa is a screenwriter, playwright
and novelist, but here he has written
cotton's biography, and let me say
from the outset that it is a heroic
biography of the old-fashioned kind.
- David M. Schribman, Wall Street
Journal | Read
Full Review
|
| |
|
|
In his sprawling
and fascinating history, Stephen Yafa
skillfully chronicles the domestication
of cotton 5,550 years ago in Asia, Africa
and South America; its importation to
Europe and the development of the English
mill system in the 1700s; slavery and
the cotton gin in the American South;
and the rise of New England cotton mills.
He also covers a host of cotton-related
subjects, including the rise of denim,
the most American of fabrics; the influence
of the dreaded boll weevil on the blues;
and today's controversial bioengineering.
The chronicle is best when discussing
the process of domesticating cotton
and the exceptional people who tamed
the fiber, whether inventors, farmers
or scientists.
Rebecca Maksel, San Francisco Chronicle
| Read
Full Review |
| |
|
|
Stephen Yafa, novelist,
playwright and screenwriter, grew up
in Lowell, Mass., America's first company
town, devoted, as it happened, to cotton
manufacture — the spinning and weaving
of fibers into cloth. His book "Big
Cotton" revisits his youth by viewing
the history of the United States "through
the narrow but sharply focused lens
of cotton."
A lens of cotton is unusual, to say
the least, and can distort the view,
as the book's magniloquent subtitle
suggests. But Yafa more than compensates
for that defect with a barrage of fascinating
information about cotton production
and manufacture and the ramified human
responses to King Cotton. He explores
technological changes with precision
and weighs the human gains and losses
such changes involved with what may
be described as hesitant perspicacity.
Altogether, then, a provocative, often
persuasive and sometimes uneven book
with much to teach readers.
William H. McNeill, Los Angeles Times
| Read
Full Review |
|
|
| |
| Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel |
|
|
| Practically everyone
in the world, Stephen Yafa informs us,
wears something made from cotton every
day. Cotton is in the books we read,
in the food we eat, in the money we
spend (U.S. paper currency is 75% recycled
blue-jean factory remnants). It is so
ubiquitous, so versatile and so accommodating
that we hardly notice it.
After reading "Big Cotton," however,
you may never look at your socks quite
the same way again.
- Thomas Maresca, Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel | Read
Full Review
|
| |
|
|
In his compelling
new history, , Stephen Yafa relates
all of this in the fabric's rise from
prehistoric India to today's textile
conglomerates that clothe the world,
modify cotton DNA and suck up federal
subsidies. Big Cotton: How a Humble
Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations
and Put America on the Map Typically,
in a "concept history" – all those popular
books about salt, tea or tobacco – the
historian recounts the origins of a
giant industry that grew around a once-obscure
product. Unsurprisingly, giant industries
eventually bend entire governments to
their will. These tectonic shifts, however,
seem invisible to us now because they're
just part of the landscape.
- Jerome Weeks, Dallas Morning News
| Read
Full Review |
| |
| USA Today |
|
Did you know that dollar bills are made mostly of cotton blue-jean remnants? That ice cream is thickened with cotton's ground-up short fibers? That cottonseed, in its natural state, is poisonous? That gossypol, cotton's toxic pigment, has been used as a male contraceptive in China? These and other surprising facts begin Stephen Yafa's history of a fiber we rarely stop to consider even though, chances are, each of us is touching something made of cotton right now..
- Lyn Millner, USA Today | Read
Full Review |
| |
| Mercury News |
If you were asked
to list the things that have shaped
civilizations, you might think of gold
and silver, of water and wheat and rice,
of timber and oil and coal. But would
you think of the fabric that's probably
next to your skin as you read this?
It's easy for me to add cotton to the
list. I grew up in the deep South and
can remember stooped figures in fields
of white and burlap-wrapped cotton bales
on loading docks. But I also know that
behind the ``Gone With the Wind'' picturesqueness
of those images lies a history of exploitation
and toil. In my lifetime, the stooped
figures were replaced by machines, and
the bales are now wrapped in plastic.
But the Southern cotton economy is troubled:
In the Mississippi Delta there are casinos
and catfish farms where there were once
cotton fields. As Stephen Yafa tells
us, in 1970 there were 300,000 cotton
growers in the United States; today
there are about 25,000. Yafa has also
seen the transformation of a cotton
economy, but from a different angle:
He grew up in Lowell, Mass., a city
created by cotton, once the proud center
of the American textile industry. But
when he was a boy the industry had relocated
to the Carolinas. The mills were decaying
hulks, ``rows of massive rectangular
brick buildings with tiny windows, mostly
abandoned.'' Today, Lowell has been
fixed up for the tourists: The mills
are museums and there are guided tours
of the city's ethnic neighborhoods.
``Little did we know our sweaty streets
were destined to become theme-park attractions,''
Yafa writes.
- Charles Matthews, Mercury News
| Read
Full Review |
| |
| Booklist Review |
Versatile writer
and journalist Yafa has produced a meticulous
history of cotton, the scrawny plant
that transformed global economies. Beginning
with a lesson on domesticated cotton,
Yafa briskly outlines the fiber's contributions
to Old and New World textile history.
Jumping ahead to 1660, the story covers
the cotton chintz craze of Central and
Northern Europe, a fad that laid the
groundwork for cotton to overtake wool
as the fabric of choice.
Cotton changed the production of English
textiles from a rural enterprise into
an automated industry, so that by 1771
the grim mills that would so influence
Charles Dickens were employing children
as young as eight. As the cotton trade
boomed, industrial piracy brought English
technology
to the United States, leading Yafa to
recount the interrelated stories of
New England cotton mills and slave labor
in the South. Yafa is at his best when
discussing the process of domesticating
cotton, cotton's influence on the blues,
the popularity of denim, and the exceptional
people who tamed cotton, but he succeeds
in combining terrific prose with impressive
research throughout this first-rate
history of the "humble fiber."
- Rebecca Maksel, Booklist Review |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
