To write the definitive book about Los Angeles would be impossible. In Everything Now, the novelist Rosecrans Baldwin doesn’t try. And in not trying, he may have written the perfect book about Los Angeles.”
—ALEXANDRA JACOBS, The New York Times Book Review
"In his deeply empathetic and insightful book, . . . Baldwin opts not to grasp for some unifying theory of Los Angeles. . . So how does the author wrap his arms around this complex city-state? By delivering poignant miniatures of individuals who make it their business to subvert L.A.'s stasis and apathy. . . An elegant and unflinching observer, Mr. Baldwin digs up an invisible city under layers of pop-culture mythologizing and media cliches."
—MARC WEINGARTEN, The Wall Street Journal
"Everything Now is a genre-bending work of reportage and memoir that’s been lauded as one of the best and most inventive books of the summer. It’s a book that delights in the mysteries of the place."
—GEOFFREY GAGNON, GQ
"[Baldwin] manages to define, and, perhaps, redefine, the most undefinable of cities with a fresh and sometimes startling inquisitiveness. Ambitious in a way that seems to mirror L.A.’s sprawl, the story is told through a series of vignettes, combining deft on-the-ground reporting, hazy personal memories, and snippets of overheard conversations that read, appropriately, like film scripts. . . Like [Mike] Davis, Baldwin peels back the faded myths of stereotypes and boosterism in his effort to source the origins of L.A.’s power."
—ALISSA WALKER, VULTURE
“Baldwin offers an amalgam of voices in the form of stories, conversations, and reflections that add up to a spectacular collage portrait of Los Angeles. The result is a daring and innovative excavation of the City of Angels as 'the Great American City-State.'"
—ALTA MAGAZINE
"Full of surprising facts and anecdotes, this is a compelling, thoroughly researched, and lovingly crafted chronicle of how Los Angeles came to be."
—BOOKLIST
"A witty and imaginative survey of contemporary L.A. . . . This multifaceted, openhearted account reveals L.A. as a 'shifting mosaic of human potential' unlike any other place in the world."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Rosecrans Baldwin has created a sharp, convincing work of acute observation. It is as clearheaded and nuanced as it is timely."
—MIKE DAVIS, author of City of Quartz
"With Everything Now, Rosecrans Baldwin maps the superstates of Los Angeles, capturing an immense urban world in all its shifts. Against backdrops of floods and wildfires, loneliness and delight, Baldwin has constructed his own brilliant scenography, a book as lively as the city it describes."
— GEOFF MANAUGH, author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City
"In brisk and graceful style Rosecrans Baldwin has produced a new and necessary guidebook for contemporary Los Angeles, one that captures the elusive and bewildering qualities of the beautiful sprawling nightmare so many of us call home. Everything Now should be handed out to everyone who gets off a plane at LAX. "
—JIM GAVIN, author of Middle Men and creator of Lodge 49
"Los Angeles invites extreme forms of correspondence, love letters and hate mail, and Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now is a lush amalgam of both. In beautiful and concise prose, he maps a sun-drenched geography that we love to hate and hate to love. With this book, Baldwin cements his status as one of California’s finest literary cartographers."
—MYRIAM GURBA, author of Mean
"All the research, all the thinking and wandering and interviewing that Baldwin did to get head and heart, arms and eyes around greater Los Angeles sits barely beyond the sightlines of the beautiful storytelling, the unpacking of myth and memory, the narrative wrestling match with a place that has crushed so many other would-be interpreters. Rosecrans Baldwin tackles a city-state’s sprawling past and present across great chunks of chronology and culture, and does it with grace and imagination. This book is a revelation.”
—WILLIAM DEVERELL, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
"With a novelist's eye and a searching curiosity, Rosecrans Baldwin has created a sprawling work that explores a place and its people, as well as culture, history, geography and ecology. A feat of imagination that fed my mind, heart and soul."
—CHARLES YU, winner of the National Book Award for Interior Chinatown
"Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now is the rare work that understands L.A. for its Sphinx-like inscrutability and complex history. It refuses to lapse into cheap stereotype or inherited cliché, yet remains skeptical of the cultish lure and sunbaked weirdness. This is the meticulously reported and three-dimensional contemporary history that the city needs."
—JEFF WEISS, Editor-in-Chief, The LAnd Magazine
“I was born in Los Angeles and intend to die here—there’s no place in the world I love more. I'm also constantly furious about the many ways it falls short of its promise. Rosecrans Baldwin has taken on the unwieldy task of portraying this unique, enormous city in all its overlapping, contradictory layers, and incredibly, he succeeds. With vivid stories and a ready knowledge of local literature and history, he captures the sunshine and noir of 21st Century L.A.: both the multitudinous roar of life and the untenable, unconscionable inequality.”
—STEPH CHA, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Your House Will Pay
"Baldwin’s outsider status gives him a perfect vantage point to challenge, embrace or confront what it means to live in LA in the 21st century. ... LA is presented as a place that challenge preconceptions, an endless horizon of possibilities where you’re meant to make your own narrative and find your own self, in amongst a crowd of others seeking to do exactly the same thing. This episodic piece of narrative non-fiction sub-divides the urban experience into personal vignettes, filtered through the city’s copious literature and the many voices Baldwin meets on his quest to understand LA. It’s a book about planning as much as people, and why LA is so utterly resistant to the latter whilst also being such a neophiliac’s paradise."
—JONATHAN BELL, Wallpaper*
07/16/2021
Baldwin (Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down) offers up a nonfiction work with the premise that Los Angeles should be considered a modern city-state. Chapters are organized into lessons about the nature of the city and its inhabitants, based on the author's personal experience, his interviews with other Angelenos, and notable or famous quotes about LA. Baldwin presents anecdotes of the city's famous and ordinary residents throughout the years (concentrating especially on the 21st century), while also bringing some of the city's neighborhoods into clear focus. The writing is engaging, and the author argues for the city-state label in a variety of ways, but the book seems like a rather disjointed series of essays and quotes that happen to have a loose association to Los Angeles and its surroundings. The somewhat sprawling narrative takes detours to explore LA's relation to California in general, and the wide-ranging effects of the city's ongoing gentrification and its impact on Black and Latinx residents. VERDICT Was the city-state argument convincing? Unfortunately, no. Was the book interesting to read? Undoubtedly, yes. This book would appeal to readers who enjoy narrative nonfiction, essays, or life in Los Angeles.—Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.
2021-03-24
Ruminations on the capital of the 21st century.
Los Angeles, at the center of the tectonically, culturally, and financially hyperactive Pacific Rim, has displaced New York as a place of innovation, change, and multicultural encounter. “It is enormously ambiguous,” writes Baldwin, to say nothing of being enormous: LA is not so much a city as an agglomeration of 88 cities, with a larger population than 40 of the 50 states and an economy that overshadows the GDP of most nations. Early on, Baldwin, a relative newcomer, admits that “I’m a little indifferent as to whether what I put down here has been thought by somebody before me, because it seems so likely; if anything, the deeper my research and reporting went, the greater my appreciation grew for others’ confessions.” Indeed, there’s not much new in these pages, which tend to the aridly bookish without the charm and good humor of the author’s entertaining Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down(2012). At one point, Baldwin quotes or cites three books in a mere 12 lines, which is at least intellectually honest: He’s not presenting anyone else’s thoughts as his own, an unusual bit of purity in the bricolage culture of Hollywood. On that note, the author is at his best when he tests commonly accepted tropes (“So Hollywood was and wasn’t ‘Hollywood,’ and Los Angeles was and wasn’t ‘Hollywood,’ and these things got confused”) and finds many wanting. The narrative takes on topical urgency when it addresses issues of racial and social justice: the steady decline in opportunity for minorities, the steady expansion of skid row, the steady militarization of the metropolitan police, which pretty well invented the SWAT team. Baldwin is worth reading on all those scores but only after one has ingested the works of Mike Davis, Reyner Banham, Gustavo Arellano, Joan Didion, David Ulin, and others.
A footnote to larger and more in-depth portraits of the City of Angels, though not without merit.
