The Dreamt Land
Chasing Water and Dust Across California
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Narrated by:
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Mark Arax
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By:
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Mark Arax
About this listen
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.
©2019 Mark Arax (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"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)
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- Unabridged
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In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. We Are Each Other’s Harvest elevates the voices and stories of Black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.
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Various Voices
- By Peggy Sweeney on 11-06-21
By: Natalie Baszile
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Cadillac Desert, Revised and Updated Edition
- The American West and Its Disappearing Water
- By: Marc Reisner
- Narrated by: Joe Spieler, Kate Udall
- Length: 27 hrs and 58 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants to transform the West.
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Too much mouth noise in narration
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By: Marc Reisner
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The Beekeeper's Lament
- How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America
- By: Hannah Nordhaus
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
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Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus tells the remarkable story of John Miller, one of America's foremost migratory beekeepers, and the myriad and mysterious epidemics threatening American honeybee populations.
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From a beekeeper
- By Argos on 06-14-17
By: Hannah Nordhaus
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Windfall
- The Booming Business of Global Warming
- By: McKenzie Funk
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Global warming's physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see a potential windfall in each of these forces. The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland - and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland.
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unintended windfalls mixed with obvious perils
- By Andy on 02-09-14
By: McKenzie Funk
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Lentil Underground
- Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
- By: Liz Carlisle
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the "Lentil Underground" begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America's Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to "get big or get out." But 27-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. Unlike the chemically dependent grains American farmers had been told to grow, lentils make their own fertilizer and tolerate variable climates, so their farmers aren't beholden to industrial methods.
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Fingers on the pulse of sustainable ag
- By shakinfist on 06-30-20
By: Liz Carlisle
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Land
- How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Land - whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city - is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing - and have done - with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.
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Audiobook Version is the Best!
- By semarla on 01-31-21
By: Simon Winchester
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The Longest Road
- Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
- By: Philip Caputo
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
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Philip Caputo, who had just turned 70, his wife, and their two English setters took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered 17,000 miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the 21st century.
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Very Disappointing
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-18
By: Philip Caputo
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Rain
- A Natural and Cultural History
- By: Cynthia Barnett
- Narrated by: Christina Traister
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
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It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of rain.
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Mostly a cultural history
- By serine on 02-10-16
By: Cynthia Barnett
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The Great Wall of China and the Salton Sea
- Monuments, Missteps, and the Audacity of Ambition
- By: Russell Rathbun
- Narrated by: Larry Herron
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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We've been building and making things ever since we stumbled out of paradise. Some of those things are incredible continuations of God's creation, while others are nothing but ambitious catastrophes. We continue making, says Russell Rathbun, but we've lost ourselves in the process.
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Excellent narrator
- By Tammy on 03-17-18
By: Russell Rathbun
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The Good Food Revolution
- Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities
- By: Will Allen, Charles Wilson - with, Eric Schlosser - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A pioneering urban farmer and MacArthur "Genius Award" winner points the way to building a new food system that can feed - and heal - broken communities. An eco-classic in the making, The Good Food Revolution is the story of Will's personal journey, the lives he has touched, and a grassroots movement that is changing the way our nation eats.
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This story teaches how to take back the soil
- By Shawn Borup on 11-09-19
By: Will Allen, and others
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The Gulf
- The Making of an American Sea
- By: Jack E. Davis
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.
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Decolonize gulf history
- By Jesse Carr on 05-02-18
By: Jack E. Davis
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What listeners say about The Dreamt Land
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael Hilsman
- 07-13-21
Fantastic
Who knew water distribution would be so riveting! Arax artfully weaves his own family history, California history, contemporary issues of labor and politics into this incredible book. Even though the book is absolutely packed with research, the writing style is far more interesting/literary than typical non fiction.
Bravo!
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- RB Bass
- 01-26-23
The whole truth of the San Joaquin Valley
If you have ever wondered why Water is such a topic for argument in Fresno and the Central Valley, Mark Arax has the receipts.
He tells the origins of brands you know like “Sun Maid, Cuties, Pom Wonderful and Halos.”
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-17-21
worth the long read...
This is an enormously ambitious book, insignificant part because the Central Valley is so geographically and culturally complex, and while the themes may be common, the actual stories in each area are so varied. In a lot of ways this book could be seven or eight different smaller books. but having them all put together like this is still worthwhile and rewarding.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-26-22
History of California…
I think this book should be required reading for every high school student in the state.
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- Anthony
- 05-11-24
Amazing research
loved it. amazing history of California. completely changes my view of the state. bravo. great research.
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- Kindle Customer
- 10-09-19
If you read only book on Calif water, read this!
If I were still teaching California water law, this would be the 'textbook' I'd use!
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- Andrew Anderson
- 11-04-24
A must read for all Californians
All residents of our great state should know where their water comes from and at what cost.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-29-21
Great story and narration by one of our own
I loved it. I am a fifth generation farmer in the Valley, and while I don't agree with all of his conclusions, Mark understands who we are and he loves the Valley. This is a must read for anyone in California.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Linda In Monterey
- 10-19-23
Should be mandatory reading for every citizen.
I loved this book. My story is this story. This is our history. This is my country and how it works. If more people want to understand how we got here, this book gives context and historical context. I will recommend it to everyone I know.
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- Charlie Morton
- 12-08-19
Damn Near Perfect!
"The Dreamt Land" is almost perfect. It takes a pretty mundane topic, agriculture in California's Central Valley, and weaves fascinating story full of memorable character in language that is often poetic. It is an ode to a simpler time in California, but it recognizes that in reality those halcyon days ended with the Gold Rush.
The audio version might even be better than the print version because of Arax's reading. Normally, I believe authors make a mistake when they do not turn over the reading to trained voice actors, but Arax is the exception that proves the rule. His reading actually adds to the text, because he verbally underlines the most important passages and brings out a deeper layer of meaning and emotion.
Just brilliant!
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4 people found this helpful