num_pages: 272
description: NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2021 BY THE MILLIONSA provocative exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States most confounding metropolisnot just a great city but a full-blown modern city-stateAmerica is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong for decades on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of Americas western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally aesthetically mythologically even technologically an independent territory defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destinythis is the city-state of Los Angeles.Deeply reported and researched provocatively argued and eloquently written Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic vibrant nation unto itselfvastly more than its many many parts.Baldwins concept of the city-state allows us finally to grasp a placeLos Angeleswhose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America and are so fully its own. Here space and time dont quite work the same as they do elsewhere and contradictions are as stark as southern Californias natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United Statess past and its possible futures play themselves out. Welcome to Los Angeles the Great American City-State.
language: English
title: Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
publisher: MCD