can't believe it took meyears to read this book
and the biggest takeaway I've got is, "You really are Susan Sontag's son, aren't you" This was an interesting read.
But it was also gratuitously simplistic and polemical,
Rieff's bynow familiar point is that white people in Southern California at the end of theth century remained willfully ignorant about their enormous reliance on immigrant labor and on the ongoing demographic change of Los Angeles into a pluralityimmigrant city.
To get there, he starts off by criticizing his New York friends for being unable to speak of L.
A. without deriding and stereotyping the city, Then he spends half the book hanging out with his very uppermiddleclass, white Los Angeles friends and ends up drawing his own derisive stereotypes about the citynot the least of which is the laughable idea that his moneyed, pampered, privileged Westside friends somehow represent the average white Los Angeles resident.
He criticizes them for not being able to accept Latino Angelenosespecially their own maids and gardenersas fellow human beings, Yet in doing so, he makes it seem pretty clear that he, himself, doesn't know many people of lesser means than these whom he's criticizing.
He eventually makes it to the Eastside to basically see how the other half lives, But for all the great import he givesas did manys reviewersto his "discovery" of demographic change in L, A. , it's amazing to note that he never seems to notice the ethnic diversity in his NYC hometown, He has to travel,miles to discover some rich white people don't take poor Latinos seriously, Not for nothing, but he could have simply left the Upper West Side and crossed theth Street Bridge into Queens orth Street into Washington Heights to learn the same thing.
UPDATE: So now that I've made it all the way to the end, I have three more brief observations:
.
Reiff repeats himself so many times in the finalpages, there's probably only aboutpages of real content there,
. It's VERY hard to swallow that afterpages of scathingly criticizing the entirety of white Los Angeles, at the very end he claims his point to be that we must all love each other.
. What a schmuck.
I found the historical material most interesting, Such matters as Los Angeles diocesan support for the clericalist Cristero revolt in Mexico in thes, are rarely heard of.
And quite well written in style, Writing before the riots of, Rieff found not a city of dreams but a city of bitter contradictions, A city that, like the United States itself, was being transformed by immigrants and refugees from Latin America and East Asia from an extension of Europe to a diverse patchwork of the peoples of the world.
This is an L. A. that has never been described before, With a new afterword. David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit, His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism, .