Mark Arax

In West of the West, Mark Arax breaks down the schemes and dreams of the robbers, the rich, and those who struggle to survive in his native land of California's San Joaquin Valley. He illuminates the complexities of development. The symbiotic relationship between corporate and government entities. The exploitation of the "invisible," the crimes of the notable, and the struggles of the everyman.

Nestled between Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Ranges, San Joaquin Valley is a fertile agricultural show more mecca that produces everything from grapes, cotton, almonds and pistachios to milk and marijuana. Along with the fruits of that fertility comes air pollution, water shortages, and income disparity. San Joaquin Valley is not the mythical California of surf and sand.

Mark Arax, a "native son" of the Valley and a former journalist for the LA Times, shares his knowledge about this lesser known side of California in ten intriguing and entertaining investigative-style "essays." And I think it takes a special hand to make the facts and musings of an "essay" interesting. In the words of Joan Didion, "You get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something." Mark Arax does just that in West of the West.

Warning: Watch your step. This book is filled with rabbit holes! show less

I picked up this book thinking that it would be a glorification of California, something to match my enthusiasm for my adopted state (5 years and counting). Instead I found all of our sins laid out bare on the page. All the ugliness, all the disillusion, all the mean and hard and crazy. Looking now at all the quotes on the covers of the book, I have no idea where I got this notion of glorification. Probably I looked no further than that fantastic Teddy Roosevelt quote and plunked down my show more cash.

What I got from this book was the opposite of what I expected, and I loved every page of it. It was real, and it was riveting. Now I just have to find out who this Saroyan person is that the author keeps name-dropping. show less

California’s Central Valley seems, in one respect, a great American success story. Back in the 1930s, most of its land was arid and unsuitable for farming. By the 1960s, it had become a “breadbasket,” supplying an abundance of nuts, grapes, citrus, and dairy products to markets across the globe. As reporter Mark Arax, a native of the area, shows, this was brought about by massive projects in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s that brought precious water to the area. Using state and federal show more money, rivers were redirected, canals built, massive dams constructed, and ever deeper wells installed across the landscape.

But this miracle has a dark side. California is a dry state, and droughts are common and getting longer thanks to climate change. By the 2010s, those redirected rivers were running dry, and in the Central Valley, the land is sinking one foot annually. While the initial hope was that the area would host small family farms, as water grew more pricey, Big Agriculture has taken over, expanding its planted fields at a rapid pace and using more water than ever.

Thanks to the author’s understanding of the Central Valley’s history and his family’s ties to the land, his investigative reporting leaves no stone unturned. He brings to light the dirt behind the politics that brought about the distribution of water rights to just a handful of major land owners, most of whom live elsewhere in bigger cities. The evidence that Arax presents leaves no doubt that current agricultural practices are unsustainable. Unfortunately, those ever-draining wells continue to pump away and the landscape continues to sink as well. The Dreamt Land is an eye opening book. show less

One of the very best books about California, ever. It ranks with Joan Didion. It’s essentially about water, because the whole story of California is essentially about water. But the scope of the story is vast.

When I was moving to Fresno ten years ago I went looking for books to explain the place to me and found Mark Arax’s collection of long journalism from when he covered the Central Valley for the Los Angeles Times, West of the West. That led me to his book about trying to understand show more the life and death by murder of his father, a Fresno bar keeper, In My Father’s Name. Now he has written the best general-interest book on California water, supplanting Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert from 1986.

The section of the book about the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, was published here (https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust) earlier this year. Go read it. The rest of the book is as good, includes more history, and is even more bonkers.

I subscribe to the economic dictum called Stein’s Law, paraphrased: Things that can’t go on forever, don’t. The current level of water exploitation in California by industrial agriculture can’t go on forever. And that’s the current level—it continues to expand. show less