Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179262 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.23" h x 6.40" w x 9.70" l, 1.32 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781586483906
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. These swift, penetrating essays from former Los Angeles Times writer Arax (In My Father's Name) take the measure of contemporary California with a sure and supple hand, consciously but deservedly taking its place alongside Didion's and Saroyan's great social portraits. Expect the unexpected from Arax's reports up and down the state: on the last of the Okies, the latest migrants from Mexico, the tree-sitters of Berkeley, Bay Area conspiracy theorists, an Armenian chicken giant's infamous fall or the mammoth marijuana economy of Humboldt County, among much else. For Arax, a third-generation Californian of Armenian heritage who spent years covering the Central Valley as an investigative reporter, the state's outré reputation and self-representation are a complex dance of myth and memory that includes his own family lore and personal history. It's partly this personal connection, running subtly but consistently throughout, that pushes the collection past mere reportage to a high literary enterprise that beautifully integrates the private and idiosyncratic with the sweep of great historical forces. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Gregory Rodriguez Mark Arax is a great reporter. He has an ear for a good story. He knows where the action is, and the remarkable level of detail he captures tells us he's as tenacious and unrelenting as the most hard-boiled noir detective. He's also clearly an obsessive character, particularly enthralled by dashed dreams and hopeless causes, and in "West of the West" -- 10 loosely knit essays and an epilogue -- it's sometimes not clear where his story ends and California's begins. You'd figure that a writer trying to bag California would grab for the big guns and shoot directly at the Golden State's most glaring issues and overarching themes. But Arax has done exactly the opposite. He has decided to capture minor characters, moments and conflicts and dig deep within them, evidently hoping that the minutiae of any given tale will tell us something significant about the twisted soul of this giant state. What Arax's essays ultimately do is take us on a series of extended field trips. There's the idealistic organic dairy farmer whose milk may have poisoned children, the cancer-stricken immigrant Armenian restaurant owner who murdered his sister and mother, the retired FBI agent who thinks the government is railroading a Pakistani American terror suspect, a kid named Redwood who lived for months high up in an oak grove on the Berkeley campus so the university couldn't cut the trees down. Arax successfully evades the usual tropes about California being the land of either dreams or nightmares. Instead, his essays paint an impressionistic landscape of a land of frustration. In the first paragraph of the first chapter, Arax mentions that he's recently divorced. A few pages later, he writes that after leaving his job at the Los Angeles Times, he found himself sifting through old notebooks and finding old friends. As I read his essays, I sometimes imagined the writer wading through these notebooks late at night, perhaps with a beer in hand, trying to stitch together a coherent narrative of a life that had gone off course. In the epilogue, we learn about the tragedy that makes Arax tick, the horrible event that honed his investigative skills as a journalist. When Mark was 15 years old, his father, Ara Arax, was murdered. Decades later, out of a compulsion to solve his father's murder, he spent seven years writing a book on the subject. This is what Mark Arax does: He investigates and parses tragedy and weaves a coherent tale around it. This, it appears, is what he's compelled to do. But the problem with these essays is that they presume to be much more than investigative reporting. Arax tries to tease poetic and sometimes political significance out of what are essentially short, well-reported vignettes, and sometimes he tries too hard. "Strange as it sounds," he writes at one point, "the war on terror and the war in Iraq were playing out with a particular intensity in the raisin capital of the world." Is it just my Southern Californian bias, or is it hard to imagine Fresno -- Arax's hometown -- as being the provincial epicenter of post-9/11 America? Desperate to find meaning in the details, Arax can produce trite commentary in breathless prose. Musing on the decline of social activism since the 1960s, he says, "I only knew that when I strolled across People's Park and onto the Berkeley campus and finally found the steps of Sproul Hall, there wasn't one man raging to thousands about throwing his body onto the gears of the machine but thousands, en masse, heedless, staring into the iridescence of their cell phones." At its best, "West of the West" is a jumble of colorful moments and characters, but if it was California that Arax was after, the bear got away.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

Customer Reviews

California Dreams Old and New - A Masterpiece in California non-fiction
Mark's Arax's WEST OF THE WEST is a rare, lasting and truly inspiring achievement in literary journalism and non-fiction. It is a piece of literature penned with extreme care and a testament to writing from the heart with deep conviction. The stories are rich in variety, sobering and deeply human, each one uncovering a new face of California in the 21st Century. Each story is a voyage into the hidden worlds that exist right next to the highways of Arax's Golden State. After finishing the book, I found myself in a state of extreme shock and joy. Shock, because the story "The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman" is probably the most raw, honest and poetic non-fiction piece I have ever read about a California migrant worker, and joy at the realization that great storytelling can inspire new ways of looking at the world around us. This book is right up there with the best of Saroyan and Steinbeck. I read it twice and will no doubt revisit it. The rural, suburban and unforgiving landscapes in Mark Arax's prose put me into the shoes of Triqui Indian migrant workers, Humboldt real estate developers and Armenian moonshiners, among other colorful modern-day Californians. Required reading for all who aspire to be storytellers.

Mark Arax's Third Book--Another Must-Read
We can talk about Mark as a wordsmith, as a master storyteller, as a truly writerly writer, as the novelist Nancy Kricorian once described him to me. This is all true, but West of the West is more than this. If you ask me, Mark is not providing illustrations of "the human condition." Rather, he's describing a particular place. And any resemblance of that place to your favorite place is up to you to discern.

Years ago, Mark told me that his professional mission was to continue in the footsteps of that true-life California superhero, Carey McWilliams. Like McWilliams and most all good poets, Mark conveys the violence, the strangeness and folly of what is closest at hand. What is closest at hand for Mark are people on the land of his birth. There were his moonshining buddies, waxing poetic around the rakhi still. There were the Hayat father and son of Lodi, California, swept away with the hot foam of 9-11 hysteria. And there was Eric Jones, a small-town boy who was nonchalantly tortured by neighbors, then shot in the back and left for dead in a cotton field near the huddle of tarpaper roofs that goes by the name of Allensworth, California.

In a story entitled "Eyre of the Storm," Arax describes former "leftie" attendees at the eighth annual Conspiracy Conference, the "Con Con," in Santa Clara, forty years after the Summer of Love. Over the course of the decades, a former student activist, now a teetotaling grandmother, had taken a "pilgrimage inward," from collective protest against to an ingrown obsession with nutty conspiracies. What are we to make of the fact that there are so many Arlenes out there--former leftwingers who wind up crackpots? Could it be that leftwing ideas attract cranks-in-gestation? Mark speculates: "Those who had tried so hard to change the social order and failed had retreated into their own psychic order. Protest turned into mysticism, and mysticism led to phantasmagoria and paranoia." Arax is onto something important here.

And then there was the roasted chicken mogul, a poster child for the American dream, who as his last act turned two pistols against his mother and his sister. There was Hilario Guzman, a Triqui Indian from in Oaxaca, who woke up drunk one morning, harvested ten trays of grapes, and then ran his old car off a road through a vineyard. There were the dope farmers of Humbolt County, probiotic dairyman Mark McAfee, and Earl Shelton, the last Okie left in Steinbeck's Lamont. There were Fresno's Friends of Israel, for whom the slogan "Nuke Iran" has become an applause line. And there was Jeff Hubbard, whose two sons, one after the other, died ten time zones from Clovis, California, fighting yet another American war, this one in a place called Iraq.

California, Mark writes, is not kind to memory. All the more reason to thank him for chronicling this part of what Carey McWilliams called "the American apotheosis that is California."

(This is a revised version of Melkonian's introductory remarks at the April 8, 2009 West of the West book event at Abril Bookstore in Glendale California.)

A beautiful journey
I just finished "West of the West" last night and I feel compelled to share my enthusiasm for this work. If this is the kind of book you'd never consider reading, I recommend it even more so.

I remember being in graduate school many years ago and gifting myself with the promise that as soon as I finished my studies "I could read anything I wanted to." In those days I resumed my love affair with books by gravitating toward fiction or memoir. To this day, non-fiction rarely grips me, often bores me, and sometimes just feels like work. I share this information only because if you are like me, this is NOT the kind of book you'd pick up at first blush.

Nevertheless, I STRONGLY urge you to spend some time in these pages. My bet is that you will experience a wonderful surprise: through keen storytelling, you will be exposed to social commentary that is respectful enough to give you room to come to your own conclusions. You'll glide over descriptive paragraphs that could have been plucked from a beautiful novel. Most remarkably, you'll bear witness to Arax making deeper sense of all of this by juxtaposing his own vulnerabilities as a man-and as a human being- onto the stories he tells.

Through his wonderful prose he masterfully reminds us that even though our personal experiences may vary, our own microcosms of truth, formed within the immensity that is California itself, are invariably more similar than not.

Take the journey with him.