This is a vastly undervalued novel treatment of LA architecture and urbanism. It is critical to understand the Anglo roots of LA through literature and art. He "gets" exactly how one after another attempt to find a canonic LA style was attempted without success. This is psycho-analytic cultural history of the highest order, with probing analysis of key visual artifacts, from early photos and revealing orange crate art panels to investigations of LA psychology through works by Ed Ruscha and David Hockney. You can not be disappointed by this fine book.

If you care anything about Los Angeles or are interested in how that unique American city got that way, you should read this book. Don't be put off by the fact that it is published by a Unversity Press. McClung has written an eminently readable examination of L.A., a city that bears analysis. For scholars he provides 40 pages of notes and credits at the end of the book, a courtesy that neither interrupts nor intimidates the average reader. Entertaining as well as insightful, the author clearly has had a love affair with Los Angeles, but has been able to objectively and eloquently analyze the object of his desire. McClung manages to reveal and explain a city that can confuse the novice. Like the city itself, McClung covers a lot of territory: art; architecture (the Getty to Disneyland, and Hollywood palaces to the Hollywood sign); city planning, or lack of it; literature (my favorite section which includes everyone from Chandler to Twain to Waugh to Didion and Isherwood, et. al). McClung has an impressive ability to "read" and explain architecture, especially useful for the reader like myself who otherwise would have underappreciated this measure of the city. McClung avoids cliche, explodes myths, and reveals obvious and discrete disappointments and enchantments of a complex city. This is a text for those who think they know Los Angeles, as well as for the rest of us. One gripe, and University of California Press please note: The book has some 150 illustrations - photographs, maps, fruit box labels, Disney cartoons and more. It should be coffee table size, and the illustrations reproduced in color where available. One hardly sees L.A. in black and white. We'll look for the improved format when the paperback edition is published.