LA is currently our most maligned city. Perceived as a swarming mixture of greed, glitz, riots, earthquakes, and paper-thin illusions, the city has become a focus for all our national ills. This is not new. For two centuries critics have sharpened their claws on this flawed paradise, and we are still fascinated by its glamour and its darker sides, to say nothing of the nightmarish earthquakes - vividly described here - that ushered LA into 1994 with a brutal jolt.

Peter Theroux introduces us to the physical side of LA, taking in the prehistoric La Brea Tar Pits, once the haunt of mastodons and dire wolves, now with pride of place on Wilshire Boulevard; the memorable official tour of Beverly Hills; the paradox of upscale Santa Monica, mecca for the homeless; and a hundred other geographical oddities from the oceanic suburbia of Long Beach to the Casablanca artifacts of the San Fernando Valley.

As a journalist, translator, and literacy tutor, Theroux is immersed in many of LA's new and old communities: African Americans, now a minority in historically black Watts; Middle Easterners of all descriptions, who have found an alternative desert kingdom in this capital of the extreme west; and Latinos, the original conquerors now returning as immigrants.

In a city famous for its lack of a physical center, Theroux finds the human centers that matter, from Hollywood to Burbank to South-Central to LA's amazing theme park cemeteries, and vividly translates the everyday lives of the people who call LA home.