9781799909811
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West of the West audiobook

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West of the West Audiobook Summary

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 cliches. 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. “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. “Highlands of Humboldt” is a journey to marijuana growing capital of the US, 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 “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.

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West of the West Audiobook Narrator

Mark Arax is the narrator of West of the West audiobook that was written by Mark Arax

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 King of California, which won a California Book Award and the William Saroyan Prize from Stanford University and was named a top book of 2004 by the Los Angeles Times, as well as his most recent national bestseller, The Dreamt Land, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the California Book Award.

About the Author(s) of West of the West

Mark Arax is the author of West of the West

Subjects

The publisher of the West of the West is Blackstone Publishing. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is History, State & Local, United States, West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)

Additional info

The publisher of the West of the West is Blackstone Publishing. The imprint is Blackstone Publishing. It is supplied by Blackstone Publishing. The ISBN-13 is 9781799909811.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Frequently asked questions

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