217 pp. Eugene Lee lovingly documents the life of a small agricultural town in California's Central Valley called Cressey. It was a community made up of many immigrant cultures Japanese, Mexican, Portuguese, and a scattering of Anglo Saxons. All were struggling to establish families and to survive. United in their love for the United States, they shared their meager earnings as a community getting through the hard times of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Japanese American Internment. So much of the history we may read or see is about grand or major events. Often what is lost are the personal aspects of life and how we lived. Cressey is a valuable record of just that a slice of life in a period personally known by a generation that is fast disappearing.
