Like a lot of people who don’t live there, I am fascinated by Los Angeles. It’s a city I’ve visited only three times, but each time it captured my imagination. My favourite crime series is set there (Connelly’s Bosch), many other favourite novels are set in or around Los Angeles, and I’m also fascinated by the workings and behind-the-scenes of Hollywood. I have not, however, read much general history or non-fiction about the city and/or region. This summer, there are a couple of books that have caught my attention. The first is Everything Now by Rosecrans Baldwin. Here’s the synopsis:
A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of America’s most confounding metropolis — not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state
America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. Not just the end of the line anymore. Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. Not just a city.
Los Angeles is best understood as a city-state. Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically — a small independent territory, a sovereign place, a city and surrounding regions bound together by population density and an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny. This is Los Angeles.
Deeply researched and reported, provocatively argued, and eloquently sung, Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now reveals the borders and probes the ecology of this Great American City-State, enumerates its cultural treasures and economic prowess, hails its heroes and charts its landmarks, plumbs its social and economic history, catalogs its canonical literature (from John Fante to Joan Didion to Mike Davis to Octavia Butler), probes its religions and spiritual practices, its languages and cuisines, and seeks the keys to its future. It is a protean, vibrant place — vastly more than its many, many parts.
Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.
Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now is due to be published by MCD in North America and in the UK, on June 15th, 2021.
Civilian Reader 