The King of California is a true story that reads like a pirate adventure.

Jim Boswell is a cantankerous old bastard with pale blue eyes, thin lips and a couple fingers missing on one hand, and he keeps to himself with almost pathological ferocity. He also controls more agricultural land and water rights than anyone else in California—more than 150,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, the biggest cotton farm in the world, planted on land reclaimed from the enormous inland sea his uncle, Col. J.G. Boswell, drained in the 1920s.

Before he handed that fortune over to his nephew and heir, the colonel turned Tulare Lake, once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, into a dry lakebed, altering the face of the Central Valley to satisfy his hunger.

Jim Boswell continued to build his uncle’s empire for more than a half-century, battling unions, federal and state governments, and Mother Nature. The story of his rise to power rivals the best potboilers, the most lurid murder mysteries, and is peopled with larger-than-life characters and hair-raising adventures. Yet almost nobody knows his name.

Until now. With the publication of The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, reporter Mark Arax and business editor Rick Wartzman of the Los Angeles Times have blown the lid off Boswell’s closely guarded privacy, and have penned a fascinating chronicle of land grabs and ruthless ambition that—at 518 pages—is as big as the story it tells.

From the first pages, this book just zips along, propelled by the adventures of those who built up the Central Valley over the past 150 years, and those who were crushed along the way. It is meticulously researched, but reads like the best feature story, never weighed down by the prodigious information it imparts. The authors make great use of quotes from the many characters they interviewed, as well as from articles and letters of the era; the story is told in many voices, all of them lively.

Thus we meet Clarence “Cockeye” Salyer, a one-time mule driver who came to Tulare Lake in 1918, a man “who drove a mud-caked Cadillac in and out of the fields,” who had “a big belly and bulbous nose and not a single pretension to personal style, [who] though a millionaire several times over, peppered the town with bad checks.”

And the colonel himself, who built his cotton empire according to a simple, brilliant plan: “Suck dry one of America’s biggest lakes, carve out a farming empire at the catch basin of four rivers and then, when the flood of the century struck every 15 years or so, collect relief from Uncle Sam.”

Arax and Wartzman followed Boswell for two years before he agreed to be interviewed—which is, the authors point out, a coup that even 60 Minutes was unable to manage. Their several encounters with the man who sits atop California’s agribusiness industry seem, in contrast to the huge tale swirling around him, almost anticlimactic, as if this one little man could hardly contain his own history.

Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman will read from The King of California Friday, Jan. 23 at 7pm at the Thunderbird Bookstore. 624-1803.