Mark Arax

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 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.… (mere)

I ran across this book as I prepared to teach a course on western water history. It does a great job of explaining the unexplained -- San Joaquin Valley agriculture. A region that most people, including Californians living on the coast, don't understand.

Where ground water is pumped from deeper and deeper depths, causing the land to subside. Where local rainfall is seen as the enemy -- but rain and snow in northern California is their friend. Where water running to the ocean is seen as a waste. Where the federal government's protection of endangered species is criticized, yet the federal government's deep pockets that built an incredible system of dams and canals keeps them in business. Where permanent nut crops (almonds, pistachios) replace seasonal crops (tomatoes, melons, etc), even knowing that it will difficult to water the trees when the next drought occurs. Where the poorest immigrants live next door to farms owned by millionaires or billionaires.

A good book to sit alongside Cadillac Desert and A River No More.… (mere)

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 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.… (mere)

This was a very very sad book. It's non-fiction: the author wants to solve/resolve his father's murder. In the mid-1970s the author's father was murdered, in front of witnesses, at his place of business (a lounge/bar) in Fresno. The author was 15 at the time, and grows up vowing to find his father's murder.

After beginning a successful journalism career, ending up at the well respected LA Times, he (along with his pregnant wife and son) takes a leave of absence and goes undercover, moving back to Fresno under an assumed name.

The author spends eight year - 8 years! - using all of the journalistic skills, family connections, professional connections, trying to solve his father's murder. At the end of that time he ends up at the same place that the police investigation ended at. What's truly tragic is that at some level, this haunted man believes he's resolved something important. What that it is remains opaque to this reader.

This book documented a tragedy, followed by an even more tragic self-delusion.… (mere)