West of the West, Mark Arax
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West of the West
Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State

Author: Mark Arax

Narrator: Mark Arax

Unabridged: 13 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/15/2020


Synopsis

Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, “When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West,” and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.Compelling, lyrical, and ominous, his new collection finds a different drama rising out of each confounding landscape. “The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman” has been praised as a “stunningly intimate” portrait of one immigrant family from Oaxaca, through harrowing border crossings and brutal raisin harvests. Down the road in the “Home Front,” right-wing Christians and Jews form a strange pact that tries to silence debate on the War on Terror, and a conflicted father loses not one but two sons in Iraq. “Last Okie in Lamont,” the inspiration for the town in the Grapes of Wrath, has but one Okie left, who tells Arax his life story as he drives to a funeral to bury one more Dust Bowl migrant. “Highlands of Humboldt” is a journey to marijuana growing capital of the US, where the old hippies are battling the new hippies over “pollution pot” and the local bank collects a mountain of cash each day, much of it redolent of cannabis. Arax pieces together the murder-suicide at the heart of a rotisserie chicken empire in “Legend of Zankou,” a story included in the Best American Crime Reporting 2009. And, in the end, he provides a moving epilogue to the murder of his own father, a crime in the California heartland finally solved after thirty years.In the finest tradition of Joan Didion, Arax combines journalism, essay, and memoir to capture social upheaval as well as the sense of being rooted in a community. Piece by piece, the stories become a whole, a stunning panorama of California, and America, in a new century.

Author Bio

Mark Arax is a bestselling author and journalist whose writings on California and the West have received numerous awards for literary nonfiction. A former staffer at the Los Angeles Times, his work has appeared in the New York Times and the California Sunday Magazine. His books include The King of California, which won a California Book Award and the William Saroyan Prize from Stanford University and was named a top book of 2004 by the Los Angeles Times, as well as his most recent national bestseller, The Dreamt Land, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the California Book Award.

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