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List Price: $26.95Amazonaws.com's Price: $19.67 You Save: $7.28 (27%)
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.940454
Fabric Type: 9781586483906
Fax Number: 1
Legal Disclaimer: 1586483900
Manufacturer Labor Warranty Description: 123970132640
Maximum Color Depth: PublicAffairs
Metal Type: PublicAffairs
Publisher: 1
Region Code: 368
Total External Bays Free: April 14, 2009
Total Firewire Ports: PublicAffairs
PublicAffairs
Features:- ISBN13: 9781586483906
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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. “The 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. “The Highlands of Humboldt” is a journey to marijuana growing capital of the U.S., 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 “The 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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Mark Arax strikes me as being a skillful reporter with a nice eye for detail, but I would like to add -- for potential buyers -- that these essays reflect astonishingly poor organization. Perhaps Arax, a newspaper writer, is not truly comfortable with the 30-page-essay form. Or perhaps his confidence in his vigorous prose style allows him not to worry about structuring his essays in a way that guides the reader sufficiently. In either case, for me these pieces, while enjoyable to peruse, ultimately ... Read More
Rating: -
This book is well worth reading for anyone interested in modern California, and how it got to be that way. It is a pity that the publisher could not have spent a few pennies on an index, which would have made the book more useful as a reference. But, really, this is a book of essays, and darned insightful ones, not a history book. It is unfair to compare Arax to McWilliams, whom I think was a hack with a clear agenda.
Rating: -
Mark Arax, for 25 years a reporter for the LA Times, has long proven his willingness to get all the facts necessary to tell a full balanced story, even to the extent of causing his own divorce, that his earlier books, In My Father's Name and The King of California, apparently triggered.
In traveling for 4 years across this vast and complex state his collection of observations, anecdotes, and situations leaves one astonished at what the Golden State has recently become as rampant immigration ... Read More
Rating: -
I highly recommend this book--you don't have to be interested in California. Arax's writing style is so good-- kept me up late until I finished it. I read his earlier book, "In My Father's Name," some years ago and found myself turning the pages faster and faster--a poignant thriller if there can be such a thing. The last chapter of "West of the West" serves as closure to the 30-year-old cold case.
Rating: -
I recently moved from the midwest to southern California, and of course though I knew about stereotypes, I had my ideas about what life in the West would be like. Mark Arax's well-written book has more than balanced my ideas of what the Golden State is like. The book contains a fascinating sample of portraits of different aspects of California, ranging across migrant labor, pot growing, the FBI, the home front re Iraq, and much more. It is a great read, no matter where you live, but it is especially great ... Read More
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