West of the West : dreamers, believers, builders, and killers in the Golden State / by Mark Arax.

To my three children, Ash, Joe, and Jake. My heart, always.

Contents: The last valley -- The agent -- Eyre of the storm -- Legend of Zankou -- The summer of the death of Hilario Guzman -- Highlands of Humboldt -- Last Okie of Lamont -- The great microbe hunt -- Home front -- Confessions of an Armenian moonshiner.

In the 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. This new collection finds a different drama rising out of each confounding landscape: a portrait of one family from Oaxaca, through harrowing border crossings and brutal raisin harvests; right-wing Christians and Jews form a strange pact that tries to silence debate on the War on Terror; 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; in Humboldt County, the old hippies are battling the new hippies over "pollution pot." Arax pieces together the murder-suicide at the heart of a rotisserie chicken empire, and provides a moving epilogue to the murder of his own father.--From publisher description.