The Dreamt Land
Chasing Water and Dust Across California
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A 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
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.
The Dreamt Land 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.
Arax, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Arax (The King of California) goes both deep and wide in this massive exploration of the relationships between California's natural patterns of drought and flood, its elaborate and aging water distribution systems, and those who work in its agriculture industry, from migrant laborers to billionaires. Though the stories Arax tells are generally of conflict between farmers and conservationists, urban and rural dwellers, and family farms and agribusiness he brings an understanding eye to most perspectives. He even gives a voice to one of his most antithetical subjects, Stewart Resnick, a domineering fruit and nut grower and America's richest farmer, while also disclosing his discovery of Resnick's "private, off-the books pipeline" diverting much-needed water from "unsuspecting farmers" into his own orchards. The lion's share of Arax's sympathy goes to the people he sees as most deeply invested in the land, especially the small farmers whom he interviews while walking fields of candy grapes, citrus, and raisins, and who remind him of his own family, an Armenian-American farming clan in Fresno. Arax brings a reporter's precision of language, a researcher's depth of perception, and a born storyteller's voice to this empathetic but unsentimental look at the history, present, and uncertain future of a once-arid region restructured into one of the country's most productive.
