City of Quartz
Mike Davis
Vintage, $14.00
Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World
David Rieff
Touchstone, $12.00
Those hills are ancient stone gods
Just beginning to be literature.—Les Murray, “Flood Plains on the Coast Facing Asia”
Los Angeles is a city with more lore than literature, and less history than either. But with three major disasters in as many year—and now the O.J. Simpson affair—it badly needs a new self-definition as something other than the catastrophe-prone winterless shore that recently posed as the land of hearts’ desire.
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