{"title":"Mark Arax","description":"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 Dreamt Land, In My Father's Name, West of the West, and the bestselling The King of California, which won a California Book Award, the William Saroyan Prize from Stanford University and was named a top book of 2004 by the L.A. Times. He lives in Fresno.","products":[{"product_id":"the-king-of-california-j-g-boswell-and-the-making-of-a-secret-american-empire-paperback","title":"The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe fascinating story of a cotton magnate whose voracious appetite for land drove him to create the first big agricultural empire of the Central Valley of California, and shaped the landscape for decades to come.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJ.G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate \"factory in the fields.\" \u003cem\u003eThe King of California\u003c\/em\u003e is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world. Indeed, the sophistication of Boswell 's agricultural operation -from lab to field to gin - is unrivaled anywhere.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMuch more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California. It is a gripping read with cameos by a cast of famous characters, from Cecil B. DeMille to Cesar Chavez.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51367388020959,"sku":"9781586482817","price":25.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/xbF1a1DFOB9781586482817.webp?v=1789106179"},{"product_id":"west-of-the-west-dreamers-believers-builders-and-killers-in-the-golden-state-paperback","title":"West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTeddy 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCompelling, 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 \u003cem\u003eGrapes of Wrath\u003c\/em\u003e, 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 \u003cem\u003eBest American Crime Reporting 2009\u003c\/em\u003e. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51367399031007,"sku":"9781586489830","price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/sUyDetkRD59781586489830.webp?v=1789106200"},{"product_id":"the-dreamt-land-chasing-water-and-dust-across-california-paperback","title":"The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eA vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil--the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In \u003ci\u003eThe Dreamt Land, \u003c\/i\u003e he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Dreamt Land\u003c\/i\u003e weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the \"Golden State\" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers--the nut king, grape king and citrus queen--tell their story here for the first time. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eArax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51367729856735,"sku":"9781101910191","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/uNmSig4eVH9781101910191.webp?v=1789113389"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/mark-arax.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}