April 20, 2009
BOOK REVIEW: Mark Arax's 'West of the West' Explores the Other California -- Beyond Hollywood and Celebrity Gossip
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. -- William Faulkner, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm Sweden, December 1950
* * *
National Public Radio famously promotes what they call "driveway moments" -- stories so captivating that you remain in your car when you arrive home, listening to the story to the end.
I experienced the living room recliner equivalent of driveway moments reading Mark Arax's "West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State" (PublicAffairs, 352 pages, $26.95). It's a collection of reportage about California that ranks with the best journalism I've read in my 43 years in the business.
Arax, a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times -- my newspaper home from March 1976 to the summer of 1990 -- got his title from a remark by President Theodore Roosevelt: “When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West.”
For a number of years now, I've been trying without success to trace another comment that I think was made by Teddy Roosevelt: "California is too small to be a country and too big to be an insane asylum." Roosevelt was reacting to one of the Golden State's periodic racist laws excluding Asians from residency and/or land ownership. After all, California racists and xenophobes in 1942 engineered the internment of about 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the wake of the Dec. 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. Another President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 legalizing this act, against the advice of none other than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Actually, if California were a separate nation, it would rank in the top 10 in gross national product. Even in its weakened state -- which Arax explores in his discussion of builders gone wild in the vast Central Valley where he was born and raised -- California remains an economic powerhouse, home to some of the greatest innovators of all time. The Apple iMac I'm using to write this review is an example of that innovation by two guys named Steve from the San Jose area.
After his marriage ended, Arax was living in a rented condo, paying what he considered a reasonable $1,400 a month rent. Surveying the meltdown of the real estate market in Fresno, he found he could buy the kind of house he wanted, with a backyard big enough for a garden, for a bargain price, enabling him to become a homeowner again for what he was paying to rent the condo. This is a wonderful segue to his story, "The Last Valley," which explores the almost unrestricted growth and short-sightedness that has led to California's having more foreclosures than any other state.
"The Last Valley" appealed to me because much of my journalism career has been devoted to covering real estate. Arax was attacked by developers for his coverage of the out-of-control real estate development of cities like Fresno, Stockton, Modesto, Clovis and Bakersfield. Even the Fresno Bee piled on, accusing Arax of picking on Fresno because of the unsolved murder of his father.
Arax explored this 1972 murder in one of his previous books, "In My Father's Name." He was also the co-author, with Rick Wartzman, of "The King of California," which explored the agricultural development of the Central Valley, the "other California" that was the setting of much of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" published 70 years ago this month.
Through his tenacious digging, Arax finally discovers what happened the night Ara Arax, his father, was murdered in his roadhouse/restaurant on Highway 99. Presented in the final chapter in the book, "An Epilogue," it's a very moving piece of journalism.
Mark Arax is proud, as he should be, of his Armenian heritage. One of my favorite people in my journalism career is an Armenian American, Dick Turpin -- the best real estate editor the L.A. Times ever had -- who lured me away from The Milwaukee Sentinel in 1976, enabling me to become a stranger in a strange land for the next 16 years.
Chapter Four, "Legend of Zankou," explores the career of another Armenian, Mardiros Iskenderian, who emigrated from Beirut, Lebanon to the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale and built a restaurant empire around his Zankou Chicken gourmet fast-food restaurants that "dazzled the food critics and turned customers into a cult." In another mesmerizing piece of journalism, Arax explores the possible reasons why Iskenderian murdered his mother and his sister and then turned the pistol on himself.
Switching to a more light-hearted tone, Arax describes the love of his ethnic group for fermented raisins in "Confessions of An Armenian Moonshiner." Thanks to this gem of a story, we learn that moonshiners aren't limited to Appalachia: "We had been making moonshine in the San Joaquin Valley for as long as we had been growing fruit," Arax writes. "Each immigrant group swore by a different mash. The Armenian and his raisin. The Slav and his plum. The Italian and his blood-red Alicante bouschet. My great-grandmother Azniv, who died when I was seven, was a moonshiner. She kept her bottle of ooug-he, raki, white lightning flavored with anise, in a burlap sack two feet under the earth of the vineyard where my father was born."
Arax travels to Berkeley for a Con-Con, a Conspiracy Conference, and goes to the real northern California to probe the marijuana growing culture of Humboldt County in Chapter Six, "Highlands of Humboldt." Under Proposition 215, enacted in 1996, the state allows cultivation of marijuana to be grown and distributed for "compassionate" medical purposes. In the ensuing decade, Arax tells us "215 had been stretched and pulled in so many different directions that it had lost all meaning, or rather it meant whatever folks in Garberville and Arcata wanted it to mean."
The war in Iraq and political tensions in Central California are examined in "The Agent" and "The Home Front." In "The Agent," veteran FBI agent James Wedick Jr. finds himself testifying on behalf of two Pakistani Muslim immigrants who were accused of belonging to an alleged Al Qaeda sleeper cell in the San Joaquin Valley city of Lodi.
In "The Home Front," Arax describes the conflicts between those who supported and those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, along with how a family handled the deaths of two sons in the conflict. He also describes what he considers to be a strange alliance between Jews and conservative Christians in Fresno.
Earl Shelton is profiled in the "Last Okie of Lamont." The immigrants from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s -- Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas -- have been replaced by immigrants from Mexico and Central America. "He [Shelton] arrived in Lamont with no mother and a drunken father and lived twelve years at the government camp on the outskirts of town -- the labor camp John Steinbeck immortalized in 'The Grapes of Wrath'."
Arax suggests that Earl Shelton himself might be a suitable subject for the National Register of Historic Places listings for the camp, post office and other sites in Lamont: "Earl stood there too, Okie relic, surrounded by families from Michoacan and Jalisco and Oaxaca. They were digging their knees into the same farm fields where he had picked cotton and unearthed potatoes some sixty-five years ago."
Also in the agricultural vein -- agriculture is always a major part of any analysis of California -- is a story, "The Great Microbe Hunt," about a California peculiarity I've never been able to fathom, the love of raw milk. Mark McAfee grew almonds and produced raw organic milk in the San Joaquin Valley. In the summer of 2006 the state had linked five cases of E. coli poisoning to his milk and shut down his operation. All of the victims were children.
Rather than dump the milk, the "hard-core among McAfee's 15,000 customers in California, who regarded the state's recall as nothing more than a government conspiracy to deny them 'living food,' raced to pick up the last bottles from health food market shelves."
McAfee, Arax tells us, was the nation's biggest producer of raw milk: Milk not pasteurized or homogenized, "milk straight from the cow's udder to a child's mouth with only a cotton sock filter in between...."
I was familiar with the love of many Californians for raw milk, even though I found it difficult to endorse. I spent my first decade on a Michigan subsistence farm, which also produced milk and eggs for our own consumption and cash income and we were careful to make sure the milk we sold to retailers was as pure as possible. Come to think of it, the milk we drank was raw...so maybe I can understand those California health nuts after all!
My advice to any journalism student: Pick up a copy of "West of the West" and absorb it. It's a delight to read and you'll learn what good news writing is all about.
General readers who appreciate excellence in writing will also benefit from the book. I may be a wistful dinosaur, but I feel that really good news writing exists mainly in the past. The L.A. Times recently decided to stop running the columns of a great writer named Al Martinez. Where are today's Jack Smiths and Jim Murrays? Mark Arax shows that even in today's incredibly shrinking news media environment, good writing will not only, in Faulkner's words, endure, it will prevail.
About the Author
Author and journalist Mark Arax is a co-author of The King of California and author of In My Fathers Name. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. He teaches nonfiction writing at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Fresno.
Publisher's web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com
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BOOK REVIEW: Mark Arax's 'West of the West' Explores the Other California -- Beyond Hollywood and Celebrity Gossip
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. -- William Faulkner, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm Sweden, December 1950
* * *
National Public Radio famously promotes what they call "driveway moments" -- stories so captivating that you remain in your car when you arrive home, listening to the story to the end.
I experienced the living room recliner equivalent of driveway moments reading Mark Arax's "West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State" (PublicAffairs, 352 pages, $26.95). It's a collection of reportage about California that ranks with the best journalism I've read in my 43 years in the business.
Arax, a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times -- my newspaper home from March 1976 to the summer of 1990 -- got his title from a remark by President Theodore Roosevelt: “When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West.”
For a number of years now, I've been trying without success to trace another comment that I think was made by Teddy Roosevelt: "California is too small to be a country and too big to be an insane asylum." Roosevelt was reacting to one of the Golden State's periodic racist laws excluding Asians from residency and/or land ownership. After all, California racists and xenophobes in 1942 engineered the internment of about 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the wake of the Dec. 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. Another President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 legalizing this act, against the advice of none other than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Actually, if California were a separate nation, it would rank in the top 10 in gross national product. Even in its weakened state -- which Arax explores in his discussion of builders gone wild in the vast Central Valley where he was born and raised -- California remains an economic powerhouse, home to some of the greatest innovators of all time. The Apple iMac I'm using to write this review is an example of that innovation by two guys named Steve from the San Jose area.
After his marriage ended, Arax was living in a rented condo, paying what he considered a reasonable $1,400 a month rent. Surveying the meltdown of the real estate market in Fresno, he found he could buy the kind of house he wanted, with a backyard big enough for a garden, for a bargain price, enabling him to become a homeowner again for what he was paying to rent the condo. This is a wonderful segue to his story, "The Last Valley," which explores the almost unrestricted growth and short-sightedness that has led to California's having more foreclosures than any other state.
"The Last Valley" appealed to me because much of my journalism career has been devoted to covering real estate. Arax was attacked by developers for his coverage of the out-of-control real estate development of cities like Fresno, Stockton, Modesto, Clovis and Bakersfield. Even the Fresno Bee piled on, accusing Arax of picking on Fresno because of the unsolved murder of his father.
Arax explored this 1972 murder in one of his previous books, "In My Father's Name." He was also the co-author, with Rick Wartzman, of "The King of California," which explored the agricultural development of the Central Valley, the "other California" that was the setting of much of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" published 70 years ago this month.
Through his tenacious digging, Arax finally discovers what happened the night Ara Arax, his father, was murdered in his roadhouse/restaurant on Highway 99. Presented in the final chapter in the book, "An Epilogue," it's a very moving piece of journalism.
Mark Arax is proud, as he should be, of his Armenian heritage. One of my favorite people in my journalism career is an Armenian American, Dick Turpin -- the best real estate editor the L.A. Times ever had -- who lured me away from The Milwaukee Sentinel in 1976, enabling me to become a stranger in a strange land for the next 16 years.
Chapter Four, "Legend of Zankou," explores the career of another Armenian, Mardiros Iskenderian, who emigrated from Beirut, Lebanon to the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale and built a restaurant empire around his Zankou Chicken gourmet fast-food restaurants that "dazzled the food critics and turned customers into a cult." In another mesmerizing piece of journalism, Arax explores the possible reasons why Iskenderian murdered his mother and his sister and then turned the pistol on himself.
Switching to a more light-hearted tone, Arax describes the love of his ethnic group for fermented raisins in "Confessions of An Armenian Moonshiner." Thanks to this gem of a story, we learn that moonshiners aren't limited to Appalachia: "We had been making moonshine in the San Joaquin Valley for as long as we had been growing fruit," Arax writes. "Each immigrant group swore by a different mash. The Armenian and his raisin. The Slav and his plum. The Italian and his blood-red Alicante bouschet. My great-grandmother Azniv, who died when I was seven, was a moonshiner. She kept her bottle of ooug-he, raki, white lightning flavored with anise, in a burlap sack two feet under the earth of the vineyard where my father was born."
Arax travels to Berkeley for a Con-Con, a Conspiracy Conference, and goes to the real northern California to probe the marijuana growing culture of Humboldt County in Chapter Six, "Highlands of Humboldt." Under Proposition 215, enacted in 1996, the state allows cultivation of marijuana to be grown and distributed for "compassionate" medical purposes. In the ensuing decade, Arax tells us "215 had been stretched and pulled in so many different directions that it had lost all meaning, or rather it meant whatever folks in Garberville and Arcata wanted it to mean."
The war in Iraq and political tensions in Central California are examined in "The Agent" and "The Home Front." In "The Agent," veteran FBI agent James Wedick Jr. finds himself testifying on behalf of two Pakistani Muslim immigrants who were accused of belonging to an alleged Al Qaeda sleeper cell in the San Joaquin Valley city of Lodi.
In "The Home Front," Arax describes the conflicts between those who supported and those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, along with how a family handled the deaths of two sons in the conflict. He also describes what he considers to be a strange alliance between Jews and conservative Christians in Fresno.
Earl Shelton is profiled in the "Last Okie of Lamont." The immigrants from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s -- Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas -- have been replaced by immigrants from Mexico and Central America. "He [Shelton] arrived in Lamont with no mother and a drunken father and lived twelve years at the government camp on the outskirts of town -- the labor camp John Steinbeck immortalized in 'The Grapes of Wrath'."
Arax suggests that Earl Shelton himself might be a suitable subject for the National Register of Historic Places listings for the camp, post office and other sites in Lamont: "Earl stood there too, Okie relic, surrounded by families from Michoacan and Jalisco and Oaxaca. They were digging their knees into the same farm fields where he had picked cotton and unearthed potatoes some sixty-five years ago."
Also in the agricultural vein -- agriculture is always a major part of any analysis of California -- is a story, "The Great Microbe Hunt," about a California peculiarity I've never been able to fathom, the love of raw milk. Mark McAfee grew almonds and produced raw organic milk in the San Joaquin Valley. In the summer of 2006 the state had linked five cases of E. coli poisoning to his milk and shut down his operation. All of the victims were children.
Rather than dump the milk, the "hard-core among McAfee's 15,000 customers in California, who regarded the state's recall as nothing more than a government conspiracy to deny them 'living food,' raced to pick up the last bottles from health food market shelves."
McAfee, Arax tells us, was the nation's biggest producer of raw milk: Milk not pasteurized or homogenized, "milk straight from the cow's udder to a child's mouth with only a cotton sock filter in between...."
I was familiar with the love of many Californians for raw milk, even though I found it difficult to endorse. I spent my first decade on a Michigan subsistence farm, which also produced milk and eggs for our own consumption and cash income and we were careful to make sure the milk we sold to retailers was as pure as possible. Come to think of it, the milk we drank was raw...so maybe I can understand those California health nuts after all!
My advice to any journalism student: Pick up a copy of "West of the West" and absorb it. It's a delight to read and you'll learn what good news writing is all about.
General readers who appreciate excellence in writing will also benefit from the book. I may be a wistful dinosaur, but I feel that really good news writing exists mainly in the past. The L.A. Times recently decided to stop running the columns of a great writer named Al Martinez. Where are today's Jack Smiths and Jim Murrays? Mark Arax shows that even in today's incredibly shrinking news media environment, good writing will not only, in Faulkner's words, endure, it will prevail.
About the Author
Author and journalist Mark Arax is a co-author of The King of California and author of In My Fathers Name. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. He teaches nonfiction writing at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Fresno.
Publisher's web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com
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