historical contextualization. While many biographiesare somewhat deterministic in their approach, attempt-

ing to find some kind of inner motivation or hiddenessence of an individual, Fujino’s many method

approach is reflective of her insistence that Aoki’s lifeof activism was a combination of socio-cultural influ-

ence and personal choice, not solely childhood traumaor environmental factors. The author spends a signifi-

cant amount of time discussing masculinity, dissectingthe examples of masculinity Aoki would have had inhis family and community, as well as in the popular

culture of cold war America. The cultural scholarshipFujino used in this analysis is well chosen, and given

Aoki’s association with guns and toughness, her analy-sis illustrates the centrality with which Aoki himself

placed upon his own manliness and the overt and sub-tle ways in which masculine identity are framed.

The allegations that Richard Aoki was an FBIinformant, which were published shortly after this

biography, further illustrate the enigmatic nature ofpeople’s lives. This reviewer thinks if anything is to belearned from Aoki’s biography, it is that binary labels

deprive us of a more nuanced understanding of indi-viduals and that individuals like Richard Aoki need

more examination. Perhaps there was a time whenAoki worked with the FBI, however, Aoki’s belief in

Marxist ideology seemed sincere, and the protests heparticipated in were not for the uncommitted. Ulti-

mately, this biography is well researched, and shouldnot be dismissed because of these allegations, but is ascholarly work for anyone interested in twentieth cen-

tury America, especially social movements of the1960s and 1970s.

–-Kimball Maw Jensen

Claremont Graduate University

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste: Heirloom

Seed Savers in AppalachiaBill Best. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013.

Bill Best discovered his life’s work of collecting,

sharing, and preserving heirloom seeds after an unfor-tunate gardening experience. He began a garden at hishome in Kentucky that had similar soil and seasons to

his childhood home in North Carolina, expecting thesame results as the gardens of his youth. At the end of

the season, he found he had a bumper crop of toughbeans, so tough that he deemed them virtually inedible.

He explained his garden failure story to his mother

who shared some of her heirloom seeds with him. Herseeds were collected from prior harvests and were not

from a commercial source where the research of largecorporations had bioengineered the beans to become

tough enough to withstand a mechanical harvest. Thiswas Best’s introduction to heirloom seeds and to the

fact that seeds are not created equal.As Best began to sell heirloom vegetables at the

local farmers’ market and to develop a network totrade heirloom seeds he writes that “[he] had been slowto realize that [he] was involved in an activity that dealt

with a lot of history and culture and also tapped intowidespread unhappiness with the state of the modern

food supply—a food supply increasingly dominatedby large corporate farms and multinational food/feed/

seed/chemical conglomerates” (8–9).Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste explores a variety of

crops that have been preserved by heirloom seed col-lectors including beans, tomatoes, apples, corn, candy

roasters, and cucumbers. Best has saved a wide varietyof different seeds for each type of crop and has alsorecorded the oral history connected to the develop-

ment of the particular variety. His work provides valu-able documentation of the stories behind the crop

varieties contributing to a deeper understanding of thecultural development of Appalachia. Best notes, “[he]

later realized that Grandma Sanford [his grandmother]was continuing to pass on her gardening traditions to

Mother, who was later to pass them on to [him]. AndGrandma Sanford was passing on traditions she hadlearned from her family decades earlier. Perhaps the

most important tradition being passed on was seed sav-ing” (3). Best does for the kitchen garden what Steve

Bender and Felder Rushing’s Passalong Plants (1993)does for the flower garden by creating written docu-

mentation of the stories surrounding passalong fruitsand vegetables in the South.

In a culture with very defined gender lines, Bestreveals that Appalachian women typically are the seed

savers. Since family and community beans tend to beknown by the person most closely associated with thebean, most of the varieties he catalogues are known by

a woman’s name such as Ora’s Speckled Bean andCora Rainey Bean. Without the diligence of these

women, many varieties would have become extinct inthe wake of the corporate seed. His book allows for

the important ecofeminism connection to be madebetween Appalachian women and the environment.

Best also deals with the issues of food ethicsthroughout the book. He speaks of his dismay upon

376 Book Reviews

his first attempt to sell his local, farm-grown tomatoesto a statewide grocer. The grocer sampled Best’s ripe

tomatoes and agreed to purchase them in bulk. Thethen-na€ıve Best arrived with a station wagon full of

ripe tomatoes only to be castigated by the store man-ager who wanted the tomatoes to be green and ready

for storage so he could “gas” the tomatoes to turnthem red when a store needed them. The tomatoes had

to be shelf-stable for weeks. Vine-ripe tomatoes, fullof flavor and wholesome vitamins, were not the prod-uct the manager sought for his customers. This experi-

ence was one of many that caused Best to begin toquestion the ethics of the corporately driven food

supply.Best’s book depicts the alternative to corporate

farming as unveiled in Karl Weber’s Food, Inc. (2009),discussed in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food

(2008), explored in Sally Fallon, Pat Connolly, andMary G Enig’s Nourishing Traditions (1995), and

revealed in Robyn O’Brien and Rachel Kranz’s The

Unhealthy Truth (2009). Alice Waters in The Art of

Simple Food (2007) notes when she tried to replicate

the delicious food she found in France, she could notdo it until she discovered the local farmers’ markets

brimming with heirloom fruits and vegetables. SavingSeeds, Preserving Taste explains how these heirloom

fruits and vegetables have survived in the current cli-mate of industrialized food and provides detail to help

fill the disparity in the field of food studies about theorigin of “real” food.

–-Jennifer Martin

University of Arkansas Fort Smith

Segregated Soldiers: Military Training at

Historically Black Colleges in the Jim

Crow SouthMarcus S. Cox. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2013.

In 1863, encouraged by the Emancipation Procla-mation, freed slaves joined the ranks of the Union

Army en masse. Abolitionist leader and former slaveFrederick Douglass saw this development as inevitablein the context of a war predicated on the problem of

slavery in America. “To fight for the Government inthis tremendous war,” Douglass wrote, “is to fight for

nationality and for a place with all other classes of ourfellow citizens” (Douglass’ Monthly, April 1863).

Within a decade of the war’s end, the promise ofnational fellowship had eluded millions of freed slaves,

including veterans and families of those who hadfought and died for the Union cause. The former Con-

federacy had begun the process of restoring whitesupremacy in the South, while the North looked on.

As the long era of Jim Crow dawned, Frederick Dou-glass found that the sacrifices of a generation of

African Americans had been forsaken. Despite guaran-tees of citizenship, black southerners were “in a condi-tion but little above that in which they were found

before the rebellion” (Life and Times of Frederick

Douglass, 1892). With this betrayal as a backdrop, his-

torian Marcus S. Cox examines the enduring popular-ity of black military education in the South after the

Civil War. Segregated Soldiers reveals a surprisingcommitment among southern blacks to the value of

military training and service during the Jim Crow era,a period in which the South—with both the implicit

and explicit cooperation of the federal government—was committed to black subordination.

At the heart of Segregated Soldiers is the argument

that African American military education inside His-torically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)

has, for over a century, played a central role in thesouthern black freedom struggle. This is an especially

valuable contribution to the existing literature on Afri-can American culture. Civil Rights scholars, as Cox

accurately asserts, rarely handle the dynamic impact ofblack soldiers and veterans on the evolution of themovement (with some notable exceptions, including

Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (1995)and Leon F. Litwack’s How Free Is Free? (2009). And,

although institutional histories of HBCUs haverevealed the significance of the military within black

higher education, these works have failed to considerhow this training might fit within the broader context

of the culture of black activism. Cox promises to stitchthese stories together, at last.

But rather than being a “definitive history,” as Coxpromises, Segregated Soldiers is, at its core, about Lou-isiana’s Southern University in the decades following

World War II. Cox, a Southern alum, presents a con-vincing case for caring about this particular school at

this particular time: Southern University was the larg-est of all the HBCUs during the Cold War, and it was

among the first to partner with the federal governmentin civilian defense training. Cox is also adept at chart-

ing the rise of Felton Grandison Clark, Southern’s dis-tinguished president and, by the 1950s, one of the most

Book Reviews 377