p15, Author at Mark Arax | Award-Winning Journalist & Author

The Ghost of Tulare Lake

I didn’t know Tulare Lake still existed, at least not as an actual body of water. It showed up empty on my map of California , not a drop of blue anywhere. I knew a bit about its past, that it had been the biggest basin of freshwater west of the Mississippi, that it had…

The Boy Runners of McFarland

Like so many dreams that come and go here, this one began with the harvest under a brutal sky. It was a late afternoon in August, 103 degrees outside, and the boys from the McFarland High cross country team had been at it since five in the morning. They had spent the day in long…

The Place

A boy growing up in the Great Central Valley didn’t hold much in the way of bragging rights. I don’t remember anyone ever calling our flatland ‘‘the Great’’ when I was a kid or thinking that we were part of some vast, shared landscape. No fine books in praise of the valley existed back then,…

The Last Valley

All roads that lead to California are long roads. They are journeys, migrations, myths. My grandfather’s road in the spring of 1920 covered 7,000 miles by ship and train. There was no turning back. Everything he encountered in the new world seemed so farfetched. The Statue of Liberty, the nation’s capital, the budding factories of…

The Dreamt Land

Mark 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 The Dreamt Land, 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.

West of the West

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 clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.

The King of California

J.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.” The King of California 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.

In My Father’s Name

The author recounts the events that transpired twenty years after his father’s unsolved murder, during which he returned to Fresno under an assumed name and uncovered the startling disclosure that preceded his father’s death. Reprint. NYT”.