In honor of Pistachio Wars going live around the world on November 7, I’m reissuing the short book that started it all: the history-travelogue of the Central Valley that came from my years-long fascination with the dark, unexplored regions of the shining Golden State.
You can buy it now — either on the Amazon monopoly or through me directly (preferred). Right now it’s available only as an ebook but I’ll try to come out with a print edition sometime in November.
Yasha Levine’s journalistic road trip tour de force into the dark heart of California that inspired the documentary Pistachio Wars. Part history lesson, part travelogue, part angry screed against our industrial civilization — you’ll never look at the Golden State the same way again.
What began as a simple investigation into a strange water deal between a wealthy California farmer and a struggling suburb in the Mojave Desert, turned into an epic story that spanned time and space and revealed who really has the power in California. It’s not Silicon Valley or even Hollywood. It’s secretive farming families — some of them go back to the founding of American California and others are recent transplants, amassing empires from their Beverly Hills mansions. But new or old, one thing unites them: They own the land and they own the water. And nothing happens in California without land and water.
If you’ve seen Stewart and Lynda Resnick — the billionaires behind Wonderful Pistachios — going viral on the internet for hoarding all the water and wondered what their deal was...Well, this book is for you
As you’ll read in the new introduction to the book, it all started with Victorville, a suburb in the Mojave Desert that was built to funnel mortgage-backed derivatives to Wall Street’s insatiable investor class and in turn fueled a global financial bubble that tanked the world’s markets at the end of the Bush II presidency…and led, as many now believe, directly to the rise of Trump and the slow collapse of American society.
As I write in the introduction to the book, little did I know when I moved to Victorville in 2009 to do my style of immersion journalism that this exurb would become my own American Galapagos…that it would be there, in a remote desert exurb built to funnel money to Wall Street, that I would first truly understand what America was all about…that it was there that a Soviet immigrant kid like me raised on various platitudes about American freedom and liberty and democracy would realize that underneath it all was something else entirely…something base and mundane. American civilization was really just a series of real estate scams, one scam layered on top of another decade after decade until enough residue built up that a real city and a real civilization would start to appear. It was there that I realized house flipping was not just a tacky theme for reality TV. House flipping was…and is…the soul of America. Even George Washington, America’s first president, was an ardent real estate flipper. His dedication to the revolution was in no small part inspired by the fact that the British Crown was preventing him from making money off the illicit land holdings he’d been amassing in Indian land. For him it was not about taxation without representation…it was about flipping houses. And of course, there’s Trump today, the real estate guy…the president.
Evgenia catching some backyard Mojave Desert rays in Victorville, California. (circa 2009)
It was there, out in the Mojave Desert, that I realized how in California house flipping and control over water were closely linked. Yes, land was the pillar on which everything else stood. But there could be no real estate speculation — and no building of any kind — without some kind of shady water deals happening in the background. And that, in turn, led me straight to the oligarch farmers who ruled the Golden State.
Anyway, please buy the book. It was originally published twelve years ago but the text is timeless, as proper texts should be.
—Yasha
PS: And come see the film this week you’re in one of the chosen cities!
Buy Pistachio Wars: The Book…