• Features
  • New Books
  • Biggest New Books
  • Fiction
  • Non-Fiction
  • All Categories
  • First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
  • How It Works
 
 
 
Features
New Books
Biggest New Books
Fiction
Non-Fiction
All Categories


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

David Kipen

Buy Now

Buy From a Local Bookstore
Publisher
Modern Library
Date
December 4, 2018
Art
Biography
Culture
Essays
History
Non-Fiction
Travel
A 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.

Embed our reviews widget for this book

What is this?
Positive
Based on 8 reviews

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

What The Reviewers Say
Rave Donna Seaman,
Booklist
[An] irresistible compendium of letter and diary excerpts from an array of voices .... West Coast match to New York Diaries (2012) is lushly rewarding.
Read Full Review >>
Mixed Dwight Garner,
The New York Times Book Review
An ebullient and often moving way to organize history ... consuming [Dear Los Angeles is a bit like watching an orange-scented, palm tree-lined, gin-soaked version of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, The Clock ... Kipen doesn’t have the historical richness to work with that Carpenter did in New York Diaries. Among this collection’s more obvious blind spots is pop music. This book’s joys are pomegranate joys, feeling for seeds among the pith.
Read Full Review >>
Positive Tyler Malone,
Los Angeles Times
... what Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018 shows us is that L.A. is a place that can’t be rationalized, explained or excused ... Kipen’s new compendium collects fragmentary views of Los Angeles, from nearly 500 years of letters and diaries, turning the City of Angels into a city of angles, glimpses, shards of perception, like a million little slivers of a broken mirror, all reflecting different images of our disparate city back to us ... A number of the fragments in Dear Los Angeles are master classes in micro-storytelling ... Though many of the entries offer riveting views of and perspectives on Los Angeles, the juxtapositions sometimes feel less meaningful, determined mostly by the impediments of the book’s idiosyncratic formal conceit ... Even if one snapshot doesn’t seem particularly enlightening, each gains iridescence by rubbing shoulders with the rest in the calendrical procession of partial portraits.
Read Full Review >>
See All Reviews >>

What did you think of Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018?
  • About
    • Get the Book Marks Bulletin

  • Categories
    Fiction
    Fantasy
    Graphic Novels
    Historical
    Horror
    Literary
    Mystery, Crime, & Thriller
    Poetry
    Romance
    Speculative
    Story Collections
    Non-Fiction
    Art
    Biography
    Criticism
    Culture
    Essays
    Film & TV
    Graphic Nonfiction
    History
    Investigative Journalism
    Memoir
    Music
    Nature
    Politics
    Religion
    Science
    Social Sciences
    Sports
    Technology
    Travel
  • Lithub Daily

      February 20, 2019

      • The scientist who tests DNA found in old books.
      • Tim Parks on how we write differently on a screen.
      • Meg Wolitzer annotates a page from The Wife.
      • What is the philosophical heart of democratic socialism?

© LitHub