The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
California Book Award Winner

The Crusades of Cesar Chavez is a biography for readers who find real human beings more compelling than icons. --Los Angeles Times

Cesar Chavez founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation. He rose from migrant worker to icon, becoming one of the great leaders of the twentieth century. Two decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino figure in U.S. history. Yet his life story has been told only in hagiography--until now.

In the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, Miriam Pawel offers a searching yet empathetic portrayal. Chavez emerges here as a visionary whose eyes were fixed on a horizon others often could not even see. He was a brilliant strategist who sometimes stumbled, and a streetwise organizer whose pragmatism was often at odds with his soaring dreams. Drawing on thousands of documents, hundreds of hours of audiotape, and scores of interviews, this superbly written life deepens our understanding of one of Chavez's most salient qualities: his profound humanity.

Pawel traces Chavez's rise as he empowered the poor and disenfranchised and led farmworkers to historic victories over the agriculture industry. With compassion and compelling detail, she narrates the equally dramatic later years when Chavez's charismatic leadership devolved into a cult of personality, with heartbreaking consequences for his union. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez reveals how this unlikely American hero ignited one of the great social movements of our time--and left a legacy that resonates today, from California to the White House.

Author: Miriam Pawel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 03/10/2015
Pages: 560
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9781608197132


Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 05/10/2015 pg. 36
New York Review of Books 10/08/2015 pg. 33

About the Author
Miriam Pawel is the author of The Union of Their Dreams, widely acclaimed as the most nuanced history of Cesar Chavez's movement. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who spent twenty-five years working for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and lives in Southern California.


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