In Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, D.J. Waldie continues his singular meditation on Los Angeles: a place of contradictions, dreams, and disquiet. With uncommon clarity and emotional depth, Waldie considers Los Angeles as a place of both promise and disillusionment, of civic memory and strategic forgetting, of natural beauty and environmental fragility. Each of the four classical elements forms the basis for a profound and poetic reassessment of the city’s image, exploring topics as diverse and resonant as the unlikely history of the Hass avocado, the St. Francis Dam disaster, an endurance contest that saw a young woman buried alive, and the sound of Vin Scully’s voice carried across the summer air.

Grounded in the physical and emotional geography of Los Angeles—its earth, its water, its fires, its air—this collection is a portrait of a city always in flux, and of those who try to make a life within it. For anyone who has ever lived in Los Angeles, or simply wondered what lies beneath its glittering surface, Elements of Los Angeles is a guide to seeing the city anew.