Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018
    Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018
    Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018
    Audiobook14 hours

    Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018

    Published by Recorded Books, Inc.

    Narrated by Tom Picasso, Jeanine Bartel, Richard Poe and

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, transplants, and some just passing through. The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid scholar of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and private estates to assemble a kaleidoscopic view of a truly unique city. From the Spanish missionary expeditions in the early 1500s to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the strange new world of social media, this collection is a slice of life in L.A. through the years. The pieces are arranged by date-January 1st to December 31st-featuring selections from different decades and centuries. What emerges is a vivid tapestry of insights, personal discoveries, and wry observations that together distill the essence of the city. As sprawling and magical as the city itself, Dear Los Angeles is a fascinating, must-have collection for everyone in, from, or touched by Southern California. With excerpts from the writing of Ray Bradbury - Edgar Rice Burroughs - Octavia E. Butler - Italo Calvino - Winston Churchill - Noel Coward - Simone De Beauvoir - James Dean - T. S. Eliot - William Faulkner - Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Richard Feynman - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Allen Ginsberg - Dashiell Hammett - Charlton Heston - Zora Neale Hurston - Christopher Isherwood - John Lennon - H. L. Mencken - Anais Nin - Sylvia Plath - Ronald Reagan - Joan Rivers - James Thurber - Dalton Trumbo - Evelyn Waugh - Tennessee Williams - P. G. Wodehouse - and many more Advance praise for Dear Los Angeles "This book's a brilliant constellation, spread out over a few centuries and five thousand square miles. Each tiny entry pins the reality of the great unreal city of Angels to a moment in human time-moments enthralled, appalled, jubilant, suffering, gossiping or bragging-and it turns out, there's no better way to paint a picture of the place."-Jonathan Lethem "[A] scintillating collection of letters and diary entries . . . an engrossing trove of colorful, witty insights."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 29, 2019
    ISBN9781980034391
    Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018

    Related to Dear Los Angeles

    Related audiobooks

    United States History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The California Gaze

      Apr 1, 2023

      The California Gaze
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jason R Jimenez

      Dec 10, 2019

      Can you imagine a world without frogs? Or even less of them? What is the night without a symphony of croaks? I want to ask that to everyone. The post A Year in Reading: Jason R Jimenez appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Project of Defiance: The Millions Interviews C Pam Zhang

      Oct 1, 2020

      There are so many stories of women, people of color, indigenous people, immigrants, queer folk, the impoverished, and the dispossessed left out of written history. As a woman of color, I take it as my task to let my imagination expand into the spaces

      4 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of An Ending

      May 14, 2019

      In Search Of An Ending
      6 min read

    • Article

      Eroded Tropes and Fears and Consequences: The Millions Interviews Alyson Hagy

      Sep 28, 2018

      It’s been 18 years since Alyson Hagy and I both won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nested within the list of grantees was a scattering of addresses. I wrote to Alyson. She answered. We’ve seen each other just twice in all these yea

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 12, 2021

      As long as there are authors, translators, publishers large or small committed to the deliberate word deliberately committed to the page, and so many who still need those words on pages, legal or illegal, right, left, or center, we’ll find our feet a

      8 min read

    • Article

      City of God

      Nov 21, 2022

      City of God
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Space for Bette Howland

      May 6, 2019

      A Space for Bette Howland
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Long Con

      Apr 5, 2022

      The Long Con
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jonathan Escoffery

      Dec 15, 2021

      This year, perhaps more than any other in my adult life, I’ve yearned for narratives that promise big things will happen in the lives of the characters they feature. The post A Year in Reading: Jonathan Escoffery appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Dave Cullen

      Dec 18, 2018

      Sadly, Denis Johnson is no longer my favorite living author. But he knew death was coming, and left us with his best work since Jesus’ Son. The post A Year in Reading: Dave Cullen appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in (Canadian) Reading: Claire Cameron

      Dec 9, 2017

      I was on book tour for much of the year. And when I tour, I read. I’m not sure how many books I got through exactly, but I read about quantum gravity, a few different translations of Beowulf, microbiology, and cave art. I read Elon Musk’s biogr

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Best Book You’ve Never Read: ‘Pieces for the Left Hand’

      Aug 7, 2019

      In these hundred brief pieces (are they micro essays? Flash fictions? Prose poems? Who cares?), the assumptions set up at the beginning are overturned by the end. The post The Best Book You’ve Never Read: ‘Pieces for the Left Hand’ appeared first on

      4 min read

    • Article

      Penguin Pride.

      Jun 28, 2019

      Penguin Pride.
      16 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

      Dec 3, 2017

      One thing you could always say for me: I was a finisher. I may not have been a great reader, but by God I was dogged, and if I made it through the opening 10th of a book, then I was going all the way to the end. Though this started as merely an incli

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dear Los Angeles

    4/5

    12 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This book has an unusual layout: there is an entry for every day of the year, but the *year* the entry is from varies from 1542 through 2018. The entries are chosen from letters and diaries. Each one is a statement about life in Los Angeles at the time. Some are from Catholic brethren who are bringing religion to the west. Some are from politicians. Some are from famous writers drawn to LA to write scripts for Hollywood. The samples may be from Gold Rush days, the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Depression, or recent days. I have seen quite a few complaints about the format, but I really liked it. I might be bored with a time in history or with a specific writer’s work, but given a piece only a few pages long, I will read it, and learn something. I also found it very interesting to see opinions not meant for public consumption, but for only the writer’s closest friends or relatives. What I thought would have made the book better was pictures. The last 150 years –the era from which the majority of entries are from- have been documented by photography, and that would have brought things to life more. Four stars for a quick, fun read.
    • 5/5
      I received an early version of the book via NetGalley.Kipen approached the history and development of Los Angeles in an intriguing, unique way: day by day. The book is essentially arranged like a daily devotional, with each day containing diary entries written about or in Los Angeles anywhere from 1542 and 2018. At first, I found this non-chronological approach to a big jolt. The entries, most of them a few sentences or a paragraph or two, can jump from 19th-century soldiers describing their ride to the Menendez Brothers trial to a 1930s Santa Monica beach party. After a while, though, I fell into a groove. Many of the authors have entries across the year, and I found it fun to follow along with the lives.Here's an example of the diversity:- "People in LA are deathly afraid of gluten. I swear to god, you could rob a liquor store in this city with a bagel."- Ryan Reynolds (2017)- "Last Saturday I was driving through the mountains near Los Angeles and through orange groves. The groves are now in blossom and the odor is almost sickening it is so strong. You can usually smell a grove about a mile before you get to it."- Valerie Belletti (1925)- "I went today to visit an old Spaniard from Spain who had some American papers, also some books from whom I learned a little more of the Spanish language."- Henry Standage (1847)Most of the entries are quite G-rated, though there's one author, Theodore Dreiser, whose regular entries are a catalog of his sexual escapades with his wife. They were so different from the others that they tended to take me aback. Still, they do add to an overall view of Los Angeles and its denizens.This is a fairly long book that took me several weeks to get through. Because of the nature of the entries, it doesn't lend itself well to sitting and reading for hours straight. This is a good book to read in little spurts--or go through it like a devotional. If you have any interest in Los Angeles, this is a fantastic book that does a beautiful job of showing how the city has developed over the centuries.