los angeles literature

The LA Weekly has a review of Gottlieb et al's The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City, which examines the legacy of lefty luminaries Upton Sinclair, A.L. Wirin, Carey McWilliams, Charlotta Bass, and Dorothy Healey, among others. The prognosis is somewhat grim.

Here, Louis Menand also chimes in with a review of several recent entries in the Hollywood nonfiction camp, including David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood:

In any normal history of Hollywood, “Star Wars” is kind of important, and if you are someone who believes that “history” means a maximum of information presented with a minimum of opinion, then “The Whole Equation” is not the book for you. But if you think that our interest in movies has everything to do with our feelings about them, and if you have a tolerance for repetition, digression, first-person indulgence, and general narrative shagginess, then you are not likely to find a more affecting and intellectually absorbing book on film as a popular art. Thomson’s subject is not, strictly speaking, the history of the movies; its subject is the history of caring about the movies. That calls for something more than just the facts.