Miss Pawel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor, is the ideal biographer. She has researched her subject exhaustively. She writes well. She presents her findings objectively and does not pass judgment–so I will: Anyone who reads this book can only conclude that Cesar Chavez was a deceitful, foul-mouthed, philandering, sociopathic egomaniac who pretended to be a saint. And, yes, he had an unusual capacity to attract and inspire people, and worked very hard to start a farm workers union. Only a unique combination of circumstances could have made a hero out of this gifted but odious man: America’s compulsion to throw itself at the feet of non-white figureheads and the relentless liberalism of the 1960, ’70s, and ’80s.