The Life And Writings Of Ralph J Gleason

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Music in the Air

Author : Ralph J. Gleason
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300221096
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Music in the Air by : Ralph J. Gleason

Download or read book Music in the Air written by Ralph J. Gleason and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Ralph J. Gleason was among the most respected journalists, interviewers, and critics writing about popular music in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a longtime contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, Down Beat, and Ramparts, his expertise and insights about music, musicians, and cultural trends were unparalleled, whether his subject was jazz, folk, pop, or rock and roll. He was the only music journalist included on President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List,” which Gleason himself considered “the highest honor a man’s country can bestow upon him.” This sterling anthology, edited by Gleason’s son Toby, himself a forty-year veteran of the music business, spans Ralph J. Gleason’s four decades as popular music’s preeminent commentator. Drawing from a rich variety of sources, including Gleason’s books, essays, interviews, and LP record album liner notes, it is essential reading for writers, historians, scholars, and music lovers of every stripe.

Conversations in Jazz

Author : Ralph J. Gleason
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 030022074X
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Conversations in Jazz by : Ralph J. Gleason

Download or read book Conversations in Jazz written by Ralph J. Gleason and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his nearly forty years as a music journalist, Ralph J. Gleason recorded many in-depth interviews with some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. These informal sessions, conducted mostly in Gleason’s Berkeley, California, home, have never been transcribed and published in full until now. This remarkable volume, a must-read for any jazz fan, serious musician, or musicologist, reveals fascinating, little-known details about these gifted artists, their lives, their personas, and, of course, their music. Bill Evans discusses his battle with severe depression, while John Coltrane talks about McCoy Tyner's integral role in shaping the sound of the Coltrane quartet, praising the pianist enthusiastically. Included also are interviews with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Jon Hendricks, and the immortal Duke Ellington, plus seven more of the most notable names in twentieth-century jazz.

The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason

Author : Don Armstrong
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501367005
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason by : Don Armstrong

Download or read book The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason written by Don Armstrong and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the enthralling world of Ralph J. Gleason, a pioneering music journalist who expanded the possibilities of the newspaper music column, sparked the San Francisco jazz and rock scenes, and co-founded Rolling Stone magazine. Gleason not only reported on but influenced the trajectory of popular music. He alone chronicled the unparalleled evolution of popular music from the 1930s into the 1970s, and while doing so, interviewed and befriended many trailblazers such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. A true iconoclast, he dismantled the barriers between popular and highbrow music, and barriers separating the musical genres. He played a crucial role in shaping postwar music criticism by covering all genres and analyzing music's social, political, and historical meanings. This book uncovers never-before-seen letters, anecdotes, family accounts, and exclusive interviews to reveal one of the most intriguing personalities of the 20th century.

The Wrong End of the Telescope

Author : Rabih Alameddine
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 0802157823
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis The Wrong End of the Telescope by : Rabih Alameddine

Download or read book The Wrong End of the Telescope written by Rabih Alameddine and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-09-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason

Author : Don Armstrong
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501366998
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason by : Don Armstrong

Download or read book The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason written by Don Armstrong and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the enthralling world of Ralph J. Gleason, a pioneering music journalist who expanded the possibilities of the newspaper music column, sparked the San Francisco jazz and rock scenes, and co-founded Rolling Stone magazine. Gleason not only reported on but influenced the trajectory of popular music. He alone chronicled the unparalleled evolution of popular music from the 1930s into the 1970s, and while doing so, interviewed and befriended many trailblazers such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. A true iconoclast, he dismantled the barriers between popular and highbrow music, and barriers separating the musical genres. He played a crucial role in shaping postwar music criticism by covering all genres and analyzing music's social, political, and historical meanings. This book uncovers never-before-seen letters, anecdotes, family accounts, and exclusive interviews to reveal one of the most intriguing personalities of the 20th century.

Chronicling Stankonia

Author : Regina Bradley
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469661977
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Chronicling Stankonia by : Regina Bradley

Download or read book Chronicling Stankonia written by Regina Bradley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post–civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators—including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole. Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern black identity.

Hip Hop Heresies

Author : Shanté Paradigm Smalls
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479808202
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Hip Hop Heresies by : Shanté Paradigm Smalls

Download or read book Hip Hop Heresies written by Shanté Paradigm Smalls and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first book-length project to examine the relationship between blackness, queerness, and hip hop. Using aesthetics as its organizing lens, Hip Hop Heresies attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the first fifteen years of the 21st century produced hip hop cultural products (film, visual art, and music) that offer "queer articulations" of race, gender, and sexuality that are contrary to hegemonic ideas and representations of those categories in hip hop production, as well as in writing about hip hop culture"--

As Thousands Cheer

Author : Laurence Bergreen
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0786752521
Total Pages : 706 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis As Thousands Cheer by : Laurence Bergreen

Download or read book As Thousands Cheer written by Laurence Bergreen and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1996-03-22 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irving Berlin (1888–1989) was unable to read or write music and could only play the piano in the key of F-sharp major; yet, for the first half of the twentieth century he was America's most successful and most representative songwriter, composing such hits as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Cheek to Cheek," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," "Puttin' on the Ritz," "White Christmas," "Anything You Can Do," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and "God Bless America." As Thousands Cheer, winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, explores with precision and sensitivity Berlin's long, prolific career; his self-doubt and late-blooming misanthropy; and the tyrannical control he exerted over his legacy of song. From his immigrant beginnings through Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood to his reclusive and bitter final years, this definitive biography reveals the man who wrote 1500 songs but could never quash the fear that, for all his success, he wasn't quite good enough.

From Our Land to Our Land

Author : Luis J. Rodriguez
Publisher : Seven Stories Press
ISBN 13 : 1609809734
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis From Our Land to Our Land by : Luis J. Rodriguez

Download or read book From Our Land to Our Land written by Luis J. Rodriguez and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luis J. Rodriguez writes about race, culture, identity, and belonging and what these all mean and should mean (but often fail to) in the volatile climate of our nation. His passion and wisdom inspire us with the message that we must come together if we are to move forward. As he writes in the preface, “Like millions of Americans, I’m demanding a new vision, a qualitatively different direction, for this country. One for the shared well-being of everyone. One with beauty, healing, poetry, imagination, and truth.” The pieces in From Our Land to Our Land capture that same fantastic energy and wisdom and will spark conversation and inspiration.

Sanctuary

Author : Emily Rapp Black
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0525510958
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis Sanctuary by : Emily Rapp Black

Download or read book Sanctuary written by Emily Rapp Black and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] often beautiful jewel of a book . . . Black’s power as a writer means she can take us with her to places that normally our minds would refuse to go.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) From the New York Times bestselling author of The Still Point of the Turning World comes an incisive memoir about how she came to question and redefine the concept of resilience after the trauma of her first child’s death. “Congratulations on the resurrection of your life,” a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly: She left the marriage that fractured under the terrible weight of her son’s illness, got remarried to a man who she fell in love with while her son was dying, had a flourishing career, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But she rejected the idea that she was leaving her old life behind—that she had, in the manner of the mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes and been reborn into a new story, when she still carried so much of her old story with her. More to the point, she wanted to carry it with her. Everyone she met told her she was resilient, strong, courageous in ways they didn’t think they could be. But what did those words mean, really? This book is an attempt to unpack the various notions of resilience that we carry as a culture. Drawing on contemporary psychology, neurology, etymology, literature, art, and self-help, Emily Rapp Black shows how we need a more complex understanding of this concept when applied to stories of loss and healing and overcoming the odds, knowing that we may be asked to rebuild and reimagine our lives at any moment, and often when we least expect it. Interwoven with lyrical, unforgettable personal vignettes from her life as a mother, wife, daughter, friend, and teacher, Rapp Black creates a stunning tapestry that is full of wisdom and insight.

Rolling Stone Interv

Author : Peter Herbst
Publisher : SAGE Publications
ISBN 13 : 9780312034863
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (348 download)

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Book Synopsis Rolling Stone Interv by : Peter Herbst

Download or read book Rolling Stone Interv written by Peter Herbst and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 1989-09-15 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its early days in San Francisco, Rolling Stone has covered the music scene from the inside with colorful, penetrating, and brilliant interviews with the men and women who are rock and roll. This definitive collection represents the best of Rolling Stone's first decade and a half.From its early days in San Francisco, Rolling Stone has covered the music scene from the inside with colorful, penetrating, and brilliant interviews with the men and women who are rock and roll. This definitive collection represents the best of Rolling Stone's first decade and a half.

Celebrating Bird

Author : Gary Giddins
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452940797
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Celebrating Bird by : Gary Giddins

Download or read book Celebrating Bird written by Gary Giddins and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. Celebrating Bird is the groundbreaking and award-winning account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker from renowned biographer and critic Gary Giddins, whom Esquire called “the best jazz writer in America today.” Richly illustrated and drawing primarily from original sources, Giddins overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. He cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation. Fully revised and with a new introduction by the author, Celebrating Bird is a classic of jazz writing that the Village Voice heralded as “a celebration of the highest order”—a portrayal of a jazz virtuoso whose gargantuan talent was haunted by his excesses and a view into the ravishing art of one of jazz’s most commanding and remarkable figures.

Collected Works

Author : Whitney Balliett
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312270087
Total Pages : 892 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Collected Works by : Whitney Balliett

Download or read book Collected Works written by Whitney Balliett and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-04-15 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz critic for The New Yorker since 1957 and the author of some fifteen books, Whitney Balliett has spent a lifetime listening to and writing about jazz. "All first-rate criticism," he once wrote in a review, "first defines what we are confronting." He could as easily have been describing his own work. For nearly half a century, Balliett has been telling us, in his widely acclaimed pitch-perfect prose, what we are confronting when we listen to America's greatest—and perhaps only original—musical form. Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001 is a monumental achievement, capturing the full range and register of the jazz scene, from the very first Newport Jazz Festival to recent performances (in clubs and on CDs) by a rising generation of musicians. Here are definitive portraits of such major figures as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Martha Raye, Buddy Rich, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, Art Tatum, Bessie Smith, and Earl Hines—a list that barely scratches the surface. Generations of readers have learned to listen to the music with Balliett's graceful guidance. For five decades he has captured those moments during which jazz history is made. Though Balliett's knowledge is an encyclopedic treasure, he has always written as if he were listening for the first time. Since its beginnings in New Orleans at the turn of the century, jazz has been restlessly and relentlessly evolving. This is an art form based on improvising, experimenting, shapeshifting—a constant work in progress of sounds and tonal shades, from swing and Dixieland, through boogie-woogie, bebop, and hard bop, to the "new thing," free jazz, abstract jazz, and atonal jazz. Yet, in all its forms, the music is forever sustained by what Balliett calls a "secret emotional center," an "aural elixir" that "reveals itself when an improvised phrase or an entire solo or even a complete number catches you by surprise." Balliett's celebrated essays invariably capture the so-called "sound of surprise"—and then share this sound with general readers, music students, jazz lovers, and popular American culture buffs everywhere. As The Los Angeles Times Book Review has observed, "Few people can write as well about anything as Balliett writes about jazz."

Grace After Midnight

Author : Felicia Pearson
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0446500984
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (465 download)

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Book Synopsis Grace After Midnight by : Felicia Pearson

Download or read book Grace After Midnight written by Felicia Pearson and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Felicia Pearson, who starred of the acclaimed television series The Wire, reveals her incredible, hard-knock life story, one that dramatically parallels her television character. While Felicia is a brilliant actor who played a truly chilling role, what's most remarkable about "Snoop" is what she has overcome in her life. Snoop was born a three-pound cross-eyed crack baby in East Baltimore. Those streets are among the toughest in the world, but Snoop was tougher. The runt of the ghetto showed an early aptitude for drug slinging and violence and thrived as a baby gangsta until she landed in Jessup state penitentiary after killing a woman in self-defense. There she rebelled violently against the system, and it was only through the cosmic intervention of her mentor, Uncle Loney, that she turned her life around. Eventually, Snoop was discovered in a nightclub by one of The Wire's cast members and quickly recruited to be one of television's most frightening and intriguing villains. While the story of coming up from the hood has been told by Antwone Fisher and Chris Gardner, among others, Snoop's tale goes far deeper into The Life than any previous books. And like Mary Karr's story, Snoop's is a woman's story from a fresh point of view. She defied traditional conventions of gender and sexual preference on the hardest streets in America and in front of millions of viewers on TV.

Between Heaven and Hell

Author : David Talbot
Publisher : Chronicle Books
ISBN 13 : 1797201395
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (972 download)

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Book Synopsis Between Heaven and Hell by : David Talbot

Download or read book Between Heaven and Hell written by David Talbot and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed writer, bestselling author, and founder of Salon magazine, David Talbot has brought us masterful and explosive headline-breaking stories for over 25 years with books like the New York Times bestsellers Brothers, The Devil's Chessboard, and nationally recognized Season of the Witch. Now for the first time, journalist and historian David Talbot turns inward in this intimate journey through the life-changing year following his stroke, a year that turned his life upside down, and ultimately, saved him. • A portrait of how a health crisis can truly shift one's perspective on life and purpose • Includes insider stories on the wild early days of Internet journalism, tech culture, and Hollywood • Powerful storytelling of the physical, emotional, and psychological impact a stroke has had on the author's identity Fans of My Stroke of Insight, The Devil's Chessboard and Season of the Witch will love this book. This book is perfect for: • Fans of David Talbot • Anyone dealing with or recovering from health issues (particularly stroke or brain injury) and looking for insight and inspiration • Gen Xers and baby boomers who understand their risk for stroke • Entrepreneurs scared of burnout

Jackie Gleason

Author : William J. Weatherby
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Jackie Gleason by : William J. Weatherby

Download or read book Jackie Gleason written by William J. Weatherby and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the comedian based on the author's personal interviews.

Everything Now

Author : Rosecrans Baldwin
Publisher : MCD
ISBN 13 : 0374721076
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Everything Now by : Rosecrans Baldwin

Download or read book Everything Now written by Rosecrans Baldwin and published by MCD. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER. NAMED A BEST CALIFORNIA BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state America 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 America’s 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 destiny—this 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 itself—vastly more than its many, many parts. Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out. Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.