John Mallon

Disorderly Fields John Mallon

Disorderly Fields is a memoir-based account of the author's experiences of seasonal work from 1980 to 1993 in the UK, Greece, Israel, Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. It is a gritty, funny, sad and absorbingly interesting record of the pleasures and vagaries of a life lived in camps throughout the world, picking fruit and vegetables where such work can be found-and it is often an exposé of the sometimes brutal, crude work and living conditions, recorded as it was observed. The account is void of political correctness because it had yet to be invented-and still doesn't really exist in seasonal circuits. Disorderly Fields is the second work in this genre. The first observations of a seasonal worker was published in 1990 under the same title. It was serialized in the travel journal The Overseas Jobs Express, whose editor also commissioned the author to co-write two relevant books. All in all, about 30,000 readers have read the first work. The author became an authority on seasonal work and has been interviewed on radio and interviewed for The Times, and invited on radio and television.