Book Description

"This is a book about Los Angeles for everyone who already knows about Los Angeles, and also for those who don't know a thing about it, and for those who think they do. It is also for those who think it doesn't exist. What is Los Angeles? The Big Apple it isn't. And to understand Los Angeles, you have to know that it doesn't want to be the Big Apple, and never did. It only wants to be the Big Orange, and nobody understands that better than Jack Smith, the author of this highly personal, highly affectionate exploration of the city that has been more maligned, and more secretly loved, than any other place in history since Gomorrah; not to mention Sodom. Jack Smith ... enjoys some minor celebrity as the columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a man who seems to have a special rapport with this city that escapes the pen of most writers, inside and out. Here's a clue to Jack Smith and this book. He likes Disneyland, and he isn't afraid to say so. But he confesses that a trip to Disneyland makes him feel like a small boy, and also like a yokel who has been out-manipulated by that clever fellow, the late Walter Disney. Here is a book about the places in Los Angeles that everyone makes fun of except those who actually go to see them. Not just to see them, but to experience them, as Jack Smith does. You would have to be with him, on a bird walk at Descanso Gardens, to get the feeling of what Southern California is, and how a bird walk can be more fun than watching the Superbowl game on TV, especially when the Rams aren't in it. This is a book for people who live in Los Angeles or its environs, and for people who have never seen it; and for people who have been here and wonder whether they should come back for a second look. It is a book for people who have only seen the Santa Monica pier on television, in a Cannon sequence, and have a vague idea that the Watts Towers were built by someone named Tishman. Jack Smith takes us not only to Watts and to the barrio of East Los Angeles, but also to the toney shops of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the gardens of the Huntington Library, and the polo matches at Will Rogers State Park. He gives us not only his thoughts about the Blue Boy at the Huntington Library, which he concedes are not final, but also the thoughts of the woman who happened to be sitting next to him, looking at it at the same time. Her thoughts were as important as his, and that may be the point of this book."--Dust jacket.