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The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
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About The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water And Dust Across
Product 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. Review “[An] exhaustive, deeply reported account. . . . Few other journalists could have written a book as personal and authoritative. . . . As Arax makes plain in this important book, it's been the same story in California for almost two centuries now: When it comes to water, ‘the resource is finite. The greed isn't.’” —Gary Krist, The New York Times Book Review “There’s a new history of water use in California that’s fantastic. It’s called The Dreamt Land. It’s like John McPhee-level writing. It’s really worth it for the writing alone.” —Linda Ronstadt “A mesmerizing new book that examines the nation’s most populous state through the prism of its most valuable resource: water. Call author Mark Arax, an award-winning journalist, historian and native son of the Central Valley, a Steinbeck for the 21st century.” —Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone “The Dreamt Land is Arax’s grand history of California water, beginning before Spanish arrival and following the trail of man-made decisions that exacerbate the present. . . . Everyone can go back to pretending the land has been tamed as the fields and orchards once again expand. The Dreamt Land leaves us with the question: When the next dry spell comes, will we have gone too far?” —Gregory Barber, Wired “Compelling and widely appealing. . . . Part of the genius of Arax’s book is how it juxtaposes California’s settlement history with today’s conflicts. The Dreamt Land shows that California’s water war is a long game in which formidable players have staked their ground and simply wait for the right combination of opportunity and luck to press their advantage.” —Ann Willis, California Water Blog "Arax narrates this tumultuous history skillfully. . . . Water, land and the conjunction of the two have inspired some of California’s most powerful writing: Didion, Mary Austin’s lyrical The Land of Little Rain, Norris Hundley’s authoritative The Great Thirst, William Kahrl’s gorgeous, shamefully out-of-print The California Water Atlas, and, jumping genres, Chinatown, with its water-crazed Mephistopheles, Noah Cross. The Dreamt Land earns its place alongside them.” —Peter Fish, The San Francisco Chronicle “In his sprawling, provocative book The Dreamt Land, journalist Mark Arax examines California's long-building water crisis with the keen, loving, troubled eye of a native son. . . . The Dreamt Land assumes an urgent, personal tone and incorporates history, memoir and the lives of larger-than-life personalities. Taken together, it is a story biblical in scope and cautionary in tenor." —Gerard Helferich, The Wall Street Journal “Former L.A. Times reporter Mark Arax makes a riveting case that this expanse—450 miles lengthwise from Shasta to Tehachapi; 60 miles across from the Sierra Nevada to
