Dear Los Angeles

Starred review from September 10, 2018
The love-hate relationship between L.A. and its inhabitants comes alive in this scintillating collection of letters and diary entries. Literary critic Kipen (California in the 1930s) gathers passages from 16th-century explorers, 18th-century missionaries, 19th-century soldiers, and 20th-century writers, actors, producers, and movie business wannabes. Common themes emerge—golden climate, far-flung geography (Henry Miller: “f you want to take a walk, you get in your car”), Hollywood absurdism (P.G. Wodehouse: “they didn’t want what I did, but they paid me $5,000 for something I hadn’t done”), the heartbreak of creative differences (F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Oh Joe, can’t the producers be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest”)—and provoke wildly different reactions from the well-chosen observers quoted. The result is a Los Angeles that’s good (Edgar Rice Burroughs: “I never loved any place in my life as I do this”), bad (Westbrook Pegler: “that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot”), ugly (Hart Crane: “this Pollyanna greasepaint pinkpoodle paradise”), and unique (Ryan Reynolds: “People in L.A. are deathly afraid of gluten.... You could rob a liquor store in this city with a bagel”). Readers fascinated by the town will find an engrossing trove of colorful, witty insights here.

October 1, 2018
A Los Angeles native and lion of the city's literary culture gathers writers' impressions of the City of Angels from across several centuries.Editor Kipen (Writing/UCLA; The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, 2006, etc.), the creator of the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read program, is a longtime champion of books as a way of forging community. Here, he uses the written word to give readers a complex portrait of "the Italy of America--no wait, we're the capital of the Third World--hang on, now we're the Ellis Island of the West. What next? Yesterday's hyperbole is tomorrow's ephemera." For the format of the book, Kipen took inspiration from Teresa Carpenter's New York Diaries (2012), spending seven years scouring the diaries, journals, letters, and, occasionally, blogs, tweets, and speeches of people who lived in or visited LA. With almost 500 years of entries, the book covers a lot of territory, from the small mission town under Spanish rule to the Hollywood glamour of the 20th century and the teeming multicultural city of today. Kipen selects one (or usually more) excerpt written on each day of the year, which leads to numerous revelatory, odd, and entertaining juxtapositions. Jan. 7, for example: In an 1861 letter, botanist William H. Brewer complained about 70 straight hours of rain, while in 2017, actor Ryan Reynolds tweeted, "People in LA are deathly afraid of gluten. I swear to god, you could rob a liquor store in this city with a bagel." In a 1926 letter, Valeria Belletti, Sam Goldwyn's secretary, exulted that she finally persuaded her boss to take a look at "that boy I raved to you about, Gary Cooper." Kipen also includes entries from a wide-ranging assortment of writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Octavia Butler, Susan Sontag, and Truman Capote.Like the city itself, the book mashes wildly diverse sources into an intriguing and surprising whole.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2018
Los Angeles native and book critic Kipen performed a seven-year feat of zealous, far-ranging research ( Everything good in the world comes from either librarians or their patrons. ) and editing to create what he describes as a collective self-portrait of Los Angeles. This irresistible compendium of letter and diary excerpts from an array of voices reaching back to the Spanish missionaries follows the calendar year, but each month contains entries that span decades. March 25 delivers a 1774 note by Juan Bautista de Anza, which the guide to diarists identifies as a Basque explorer and the governor of Spanish-ruled New Mexico, followed by a 1942 entry by Bertolt Brecht about having to register as an enemy alien, and a vivid 1946 dispatch by Eleanor Roosevelt. November 12 stretches from 1854 to 2016. Rapport grows with the diarists who appear throughout the book in which regular folks mix with the likes of Lillian Gish, Dalton Trumbo, Thomas Mann, Raymond Chandler, Octavia E. Butler, Christopher Isherwood, M. F. K. Fisher, and dozens more. This West Coast match to New York Diaries (2012) is lushly rewarding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)