L.A. lore - Stephen Brook

Nobody is indifferent to Los Angeles. Those who love the city praise its climate, its gentle pace of life, its glamour. Its detractors jeer at Los Angeles as a city of airheads, the domain of surfers and cocaine-snorting movie stars on one hand, and of murderous roaming gangs on the other. All images of Los Angeles are true, and the city reflects and adapts itself to the aspiration of those who come to it. More than any other city in America, Los Angeles is in a state of constant mutation, as thousands of immigrants pour into the city each year, bringing with them their cultures and cuisines, adding to and altering the texture of a city that some of its admirers dare to consider the true capital of America.;The author travels the freeways and airways of Los Angeles, casting an eye on the familiar aspects of the city, from Venice Beach to Beverly Hills, burrowing into Los Angeles' counter-culture and revelling in the city's diversity.;The result is a book that confounds the stereotypes. The author swelters in Zsa Zsa Gabor's sauna, attends a Sikh festival and an evangelical crusade, picks the brains of America's most brilliant scientists, hits a bull's eye at the Beverly Hills Gun Club, visits his local witch, tangles with a centenarian factotum and a Korean masseuse, chats to gang members in Watts and to plastic surgeons in Westwood, and mingles with the stars.