The Heart of California - by Aaron Gilbreath (Paperback)

About the Book

Aaron Gilbreath writes a highly personal narrative of the San Joaquin Valley that incorporates history, Native American displacement, agriculture, environmental concerns, and more.

Book Synopsis

2022 Oregon Book Award Finalist

Aaron Gilbreath uses his keen eye and environmental consciousness, historical records, and the occasional imaginative flight to give us an invaluable portrait of an overlooked place.--Thomas Swick, author of A Way to See the World

Mixing travel writing, historical recreations, western history, natural history, and first-person reportage, The Heart of California is a road-trip narrative about this fascinating region and its most important early documentarian.

A vivid journey through California's vast rural interior, The Heart of California weaves the story of historian Frank Latta's forgotten 1938 boat trip from Bakersfield to San Francisco with Aaron Gilbreath's trip retracing Latta's route by car during the 2014 drought. Latta embarked on his journey to publicize the need for dams and levees to improve flood control. Gilbreath made his own trip to profile Latta and the productive agricultural world that damming has created in the San Joaquin Valley, to describe the region's nearly lost indigenous culture and ecosystems, and to bring this complex yet largely ignored landscape to life.

The Valley is home to some of California's fastest growing cities and, by some estimates, produces 25 percent of America's food. The Valley feeds too many people, and is too unique, to be ignored. To understand California, you have to understand the Valley.

Review Quotes

"The Heart of California is a quickly moving history with unexpected adventure. There's a little Joan Didion, James D. Houston, Gerald Haslam, Kevin Starr, and Mark Arax in these pages. Aaron Gilbreath's observations are an extension of these writers and, I could argue, their equal."--Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin-- (2/26/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"Aaron Gilbreath uses his keen eye and environmental consciousness, historical records, and the occasional imaginative flight to give us an invaluable portrait of an overlooked place."--Thomas Swick, author of A Way to See the World-- (2/26/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"Add The Heart of California to your list of essential reading, for it expands and deepens the Golden State's image to include gritty realities and small triumphs too often ignored. There's no understanding the state without also understanding the sometimes remote, but essential realities Gilbreath explores. Organized around Frank F. Latta's 1938 rowboat trip up the San Joaquin Valley to San Francisco Bay, this book recounts an adventure writ small but with large implications. Welcome to a new regional classic."--Gerald W. Haslam, editor of Many Californias: Literature from the Golden State

"In this captivating memoir, author Aaron Gilbreath takes us along on a journey through the vast interior of California, sandwiched between the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Coast Range. Inspired by the 1938 boat trip from Bakersfield to San Francisco of historian Frank Latta, Gilbreath retraces the trip by car during the drought of 2014, weaving in Latta's fascinating narrative with his own. . . . A must-read in order to fully grasp the California experience."--Melanie Dragger, Literary West Review

"This is what the San Joaquin Valley looks and sounds like and how it feels."--Don Thompson, native Valley poet and author of Back Roads-- (2/26/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"Without question, riding downriver through the San Joaquin Valley's past and present with Aaron Gilbreath is one of the greatest and most unexpected journeys I've taken in a long, long time."--Joe Donnelly, author of L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World-- (2/26/2020 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Aaron Gilbreath is an essayist, a journalist, and previously a contributing editor at Longreads. He has written essays and articles for Harper's, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Dublin Review and his work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Gilbreath is the author of two essay collections, Everything We Don't Know: Essays and This Is: Essays on Jazz.