[In Sal Si Puedes Peter Matthiessen] prefers the typewriter equivalent of the cinema verité, shoulder-held camera approach over the rehearsed, Mennen-deodorized, color-enhanced sound stage method…. As a consequence, Matthiessen records everything pretty much as it's happening and being said; and the reader is allowed to share in the surprise of experience with all its jostles, open-endedness and frequent lack of sequential progression. (It isn't until well into the book's second half that much is told of Chavez' childhood—Matthiessen waited for the recollections to surface from a more spontaneous stimulus than a writer's questioning).

The method left me feeling I had been there—walking with Chavez early one August morning along a highway at Delano's edge, eating matzohs and drinking Diet Cola at the end of the fast, picketing with Mexican-American and Filipino strikers (while Mrs. Zapata, a large woman, bellowed la causa's message to the laboring...