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 clich&eacutes. 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."The 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."The Highlands of Humboldt" is a journey to marijuana growing capital of the U.S., 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"The 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.

On January 2, 1972, Mark Arax's childhood came to a sudden, explosive end when his father was shot to death at his nightclub in Fresno, California. It was one of the most sensational murders in California's heartland, and it was never solved.

Mark, only fifteen years old at the time, was left with a legacy of questions: Were the rumors about his father true? Had he led a double life? Was he killed because of his dealings with the underworld?

Mark Arax, an award-winning journalist at the "Los Angeles Times, " now writes a searing, intensely personal account of his twenty-two-year search for answers about his father's life and death, and his own identity.

As the oldest child, Mark was thrust into the role of patriarch. His quest for answers began in high school, when he sought out his father's father, an Armenian immigrant. His grandfather opened a window into an old country world full of promise and heartbreak -- and four generations of eccentric family members.

Two decades later, Mark uprooted his wife and baby and returned to Fresno under an assumed name to try and determine who killed his father and why. Fearing for his own life, he discovers his father was murdered just before he was going to make a startling disclosure.

More than a true-life murder mystery, more than an exploration of family and culture, "In My Father's Name" is the poignant story of one man's remarkable journey as he uncovers long-hidden secrets about his father, his family, his heritage, and the town he once called home.

J.G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labour 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.Much more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California. It is a gripping read with cameos by a cast of famous characters, from Cecil B. DeMille to Cesar Chavez.