Orange County: A Personal History

As a native born South Texan, I never gave California much thought till I came out to teach here in the early 90s. Since then I have been blown away by the beauty and horrors of a magnificent state--staggered by its resources and its peoples, floored by its violent and surprising history. Gustavo Arellano's ORANGE COUNTY is one of those delicious, honest tomes that tells the various ugly, outrageous, AND beautiful stories of southern California with wit, vision, pace, and style. A unique book--one part memoir, one part history, one part investigative journalism--Arellano's volume explores the backstory of the Southlands, uncovering skeletons, crazies, and, of course, oranges along the way. Any student of contemporary writing will find much to learn from and ponder in this volume; Californiana aficionados will find that and more, as the all-too-often white-washed contours of the Californias are reborn in the electric writings of the man better known as Ask a Mexican.

While most writing and almost all journalism is attempting to make their subjects less complex Gustavo Arellano is accepting the complexity and relishing it. His book "Orange County' is a wonderfully complex story of his family, its migration, the towns where they settled, the history of the towns and the strange paradox that is Orange County, California. There are very funny repetitions of lists of Aunts (I think he's mocking Leviticus) the story of his being a nerd among the macho and constant jibes at the gabachos. My favorite part was the restaurant recommendations , one for each town except Leisure World. This is the perfect book to give as a Christmas gift to anyone with a sense of humor who lives in Orange County. It is a quick read, it has new data and will make you think again about the place you live. Well done!

This is a great story combining the history of Orange County with a memoir of the author. Arellano is pretty well know in "the OC" for his weekly column "Ask a Mexican" and this book reflects his wit and wisdom as well. I really enjoyed it.

Riding the crest of his wildly successful -- and controversial -- syndicated column "¡Ask a Mexican!" (and a best-selling book of the same name), Gustavo Arellano brings us a memoir, "Orange County: A Personal History (I've Been Taking Notes)" (Scribner, $24 hardcover). If you were to ask a person on the street what Orange County stands for, you likely would hear such things as Disneyland, John Wayne, idyllic suburbia and expansive shopping opportunities. If you ask Arellano, you would get a decidedly different answer. In fact, as a lifetime resident of Orange County, he felt that there was a need for a book that told the truth about his hometown. When I chatted with him recently, I asked which O.C. myth he most wanted to dispel with his memoir. "That Orange County is Eden," he said. "It's not. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else on earth, but I acknowledge the corruption, the Mexican-bashing, the iron grasp developers have on county residents, the class warfare across O.C." Not to worry. Despite this rather serious goal, "Orange County" is crammed with Arellano's mordant wit mixed with a healthy dose of personal and cultural history. The result is an often-funny, sometimes-moving tale that stands in stark contrast with the mythology of Orange County. The O.C. will never be the same. Interestingly, Arellano relies heavily on his experiences growing up in an immigrant neighborhood that suffered from tough economic circumstances but which maintained family strong ties with Mexico. He touches upon his adolescent awkwardness, his father's drinking problems and other familial imperfections. I wondered why Arellano decided to combine a cultural history with a memoir. "The two books I always wanted to write were a history of Orange County and another telling the mass exodus of the ranchos of my mami y papi to Anaheim and points beyond," he explained. "My agent was excited about the Orange County angle, but he was more enthralled by the tales of my family's four generations in Anaheim." Arellano agreed to the double focus, but it took some work: "Guided by my editor Brant Rumble, I was able to accomplish the tricky feat of the hybrid that both told a serious history of a much-stereotyped region but also wove in the modern story of Mexican migration to los Estados Unidos." Arellano sprinkles his book with little boxes that offer pithy descriptions of O.C. communities such as Buena Park ("One of our many cities with a stupid Spanglish name"), Newport Beach ("No ghettos here, but a lot of recovering-addict homes"), and Costa Mesa ("The city that wished it were like neighboring Newport Beach"). And because Arellano has been a food critic for the OC Weekly for the past four years, he includes food recommendations for each community, such as Abel's Bakery in Lake Forest -- which, he informs us, was once a Jewish bakery but is now run by a Mexican Mormon. Whether he's writing about Mexican, Greek, Korean, Cuban or Persian cuisine (to nam

OC Weekly's, Gustavo "Ask a Mexican" Arellano does it again! For those of us who live in the REAL OC, and even for those who don't - Gustavo flawlessly weaves a personal family history with the raw and interesting facts of this great county of ours. Amazing book, choc full of Arellano's brand of wit (as always). A must read!