Testimonials on Bean Pickers:

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Karen Hempson has written a charming and insightful book about her family’s journey from Italy to upstate New York. Bean Pickers, tells the story of a family who struggled through poverty and deprivation to work long, hard days picking beans so that their children would have a better chance at life. Enduring hardships in substandard shacks in upstate, New York, immigrants and children of immigrants seek ways of escaping their destitute lives during the Great Depression. The book is especially appealing because of family photographs and documents reflecting life in the early to mid-twentieth century. Bean Pickers has the depth and clarity that transcends one family’s narrative into what is America’s story.”

   Dr. Erik J. Bitterbaum, President, State University of New York, College at Cortland

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Bean Pickers is an intimate window on an Italian family who immigrated to Utica, New York in the early twentieth century. Vivid portrayals of childhood summers lost to labor in sweltering bean fields, ethnic discrimination on athletic fields and teeming factory floors, reveal real people in their struggles and triumphs striving for their version of the American dream. The rich yet often harsh lives of the author’s ancestors serve as a reminder to us, as Americans, to greet a new generation of immigrants with compassion and assistance.”

                                                                        Judith McGinn, Free-lance writer