The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires - by Stanley Crawford (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Readers who care about preserving local businesses will appreciate this new book by writer and garlic farm owner Stanley Crawford. In the fall of 2014, Crawford questioned US tariff exemptions for the country's largest importer of Chinese garlic. This set off a massive legal battle, pitting his small New Mexico farm against the importer and its international law firms. In this compelling account of his David-and-Goliath battle, now in its fifth year, Crawford describes his personal and farming life under a cloud of lawsuits and administrative skirmishes. The unusual case was of such interest that it became the subject of a Netflix documentary, "Garlic Breath," in the six-part series Rotten, released in 2018.

Review Quotes

"Every tenderfoot city-bred person like myself would benefit by reading The Garlic Papers . . . if only to get the feel of how many skills and tools and thoughts are necessary to work even a two-acre garlic farm beside a small river in northern New Mexico. . . . The Garlic Papers' account is vivid, entertaining, revealing, . . ."
―MICHAEL VENTURA, novelist, screenwriter, film director, essayist and cultural critic

"The Garlic Papers is as important in our time as the personally much less communal Thoreau's work in his. Uniquely distinguished in America as both writer and farmer, Stanley Crawford answers a bizarre and atrocious legal attack with a pointed defense yet also with the fullness of his long life evoked in everyday detail here by the particular fight for justice against lies and betrayal undermining fair competition."
-JOSEPH MCELROY, author of The Smuggler's Bible, Lookout Cartridge, Women and Men, and six other novels

"Superb. A remarkable achievement."
-VERLYN KLINKENBORG, author and former member of the New York Times editorial board, whose opinion column, "The Rural Times," appeared in the newspaper for sixteen years.

REVIEWS for A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

"Meditative . . . passionate . . . rich with respect for human toil . . . Mr. Crawford is at his best here, detailing the healing and annealing aspect of the repetitive tasks that bring his crop to market in clear-sighted, eloquent prose."
-The New York Times

"Superb, quiet...a plainspoken wisdom."
-The New Yorker

"This elegant and unsentimental account of how Crawford learned to grow his principal crop, garlic, and what that process has revealed about himself and his place in the world is probing. An eloquent paean to physical effort and to the land he cares for and depends on, his chronicle is a treasure trove of planting lore, from the autumn planting of garlic cloves to the winter-long "hibernation," the sighting of first shoots in spring, the formation of seed stalks in early summer, the harvesting soon after, and the less satisfying process, to him, of selling his produce, including statice and squash, at farmers' markets in Santa Fe and Los Alamos. Crawford's keen observations, penned in well-hewn prose, are as reflectively nurtured and pungently powerful as his crop of choice."
-Publishers Weekly

"An evocative book written in clean, often startlingly beautiful prose."
-Kirkus