A new book hitting bookstores nationally this week “offers a searing report on recent immigrants enslaved as workers in out-of-the-way places in modern-day America,” according to Kirkus Reviews, which goes on to term the book — entitled “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy” by John Bowe — “brilliantly reported.”

The USA Today review (9/17/07) is even more effusive: “Nobodies is investigative, immersion reporting at its best… Bowe is a master storyteller whose work is finely tuned and fearless.” The review wraps up with this:

“Something must be said of Nobodies’ final chapter, a masterwork and mixing pot of ideas, spiced by the anger of an intelligent man who has witnessed too many instances of the Latin proverb, homo homini lupus: man is a wolf to man.

There’s a chill in the air when he writes: “If you can read this page, you are on top of the world and billions of people are beneath you. Your ignorance and your lack of a program will likely equal the squalor of your grandchildren’s existence.” read the rest of the USA Today review here

The book is a timely rebuke to fast-food executives who would continue to bury their heads ever deeper in the sand and claim ignorance of the often barbaric conditions in Florida’s fields.

The CIW figures prominently in the new book. Bowe takes an in-depth look at three modern-day slavery prosecutons, including the 2004 Ramos case out of central Florida discovered and investigated by the CIW. The book also examines the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food as a creative, long-term solution to the seemingly intractable problem of forced labor in Florida agriculture.

Here’s part of an excerpt from the book, published in the Wall St. Journal (9/14/07):

“On April 20, 1997, at around 10 p.m., the Highlands County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call; something strange had happened out in the migrant-worker ghetto near Highlands Boulevard. The “neighborhood,” a mishmash of rotting trailer homes and plywood shacks, was hidden outside the town of Lake Placid, a mile or two back from the main road. By day, the place was forbidding and cheerless, silent, its forlorn dwellings perched awry, in seeming danger of oozing into the swamp. By night, it was downright menacing, humid and thick with mosquitoes.

When the sheriff’s officers arrived, they found an empty van parked beside a lonely, narrow lane. The doors were closed, the lights were still on, and a few feet away, in the steamy hiss of night, a man lay facedown in a pool of blood. He had been shot once in the back of the head, execution-style. Beyond his body stood a pay phone, mounted on a pole.

The 911 caller had offered a description of a truck the sheriff’s officers recognized as belonging to a local labor contractor named Ramiro Ramos. At 1:30 a.m., officers were dispatched to Ramos’s house. It’s unclear how much the officers knew about the relationship between Ramos and his employees… ” read the rest of the Wall Street Journal excerpt here

Click here for the St. Petersburg Times article on the book, “Workers groups wins high praise in new book” 9/15/07).

Click here for the review from Kirkus Review.

Click here for the Amazon.com listing for the book.