Gomez details how the dramatic effects of theMississippi River Flood of 1927, which weremagnified in bayous due to protective measurestaken around New Orleans, devastated themuskrat fur industry, for instance. And NewOrleans’s desire not to lose business to the St.Lawrence Seaway after the mid-1950s requirednew navigational aids that in turn, many firmlybelieved, made the region more prone todisaster, explains Todd Shallat. He quotes aformer U.S. Army Corps of Engineers publicistand local homeowner: ‘‘It is ironic. The systemwhich brings prosperity and security to humansis literally costing them the earth beneath theirfeet’’ (p. 137).

The lesson from Part Three is elaborated inPart Four: the hardest accommodations of allare those to the human environmental mod-ifications themselves. Colten’s historical-geog-raphical analysis of industrialization along thelower river, especially the petrochemical in-dustry around Baton Rouge, reminds us howrecently we have really come to understand thenotion of downstream effects. Certainly pollu-tion effects were known—people were payingattention to bacterial and biological effects onshellfish by the 1950s and to fish kills frompesticides by the 1960s. Only in the 1970s,however, did emphasis switch from rural tourban and from wildlife to human problems,with a focus on New Orleans’s drinking water.Raymond Burby develops the argument withgreater focus on Baton Rouge, alleging envir-onmental racism. The question of whetherindustry invaded neighborhoods or neighbor-hoods grew up around jobs remains, but it isclear that property values remain suppressed.Lack of planning did not help, but lack ofpolitical will to defend people in the face ofeconomic development was crucial. BarbaraAllen takes a fine lens to localized illness tocarry the argument of environmental racismfurther, asking, ‘‘Science for whom?’’ The bookconcludes with H. L. Bart’s analysis of anthro-pogenetic modification of fish diversity.

I learned much about the lower MississippiRiver and its complex and intertwined geomor-phology, biology, and cultural geography fromthis volume. I was impressed with the range ofdisciplinary takes and of scales of analysisemployed by authors. Measured modestly inColten’s own words, ‘‘[T]he work offers per-spectives on critical aspects of human encoun-

ters with natural processes’’ (p. 6), and in thoseterms it succeeds. Key Words: human transfor-mation, Mississippi River, New Orleans.

Literature CitedLewis, Peirce. 1976. New Orleans: The Making of

an Urban Landscape. Cambridge, MA: BallingerPublishing Co.

Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and theCity. Deepak Narang Sawhney, ed. NewYork: Palgrove, 2002. x and 266 pp., photos.,and index. $24.95 paper (ISBN 0-312-29289-9).

Reviewed by Steven Flusty, Southern Califor-nia Studies Center and the Department ofGeography, University of Southern Califor-nia, Los Angeles, CA.

Through the 1990s, a sea change occurred inpopular and academic conceptions of LosAngeles. Prior to this period, L.A. had beenthe great exception, a vast low-rise sprawlwrapped in Gordian freeway interchanges andpopulated by nuts, flakes, and their peculiarpopulist movements. Sometime in the middle1980s, however, observations of how urbanchange across the U.S. and other postindus-trializing locales bore isomorphisms with theexistent Angeleno condition led many to recastL.A. as the great exemplar, the harbinger of theurban future. Now, a few years past the heydayof ‘‘L.A.-ology,’’ a less pyrotechnic approach isemerging that interrogates L.A. as neitherexception nor exemplar, but as one of a numberof cities that offer useful insights into globaltrajectories of contemporary urban change.Unmasking L.A. is the most recent addition tothis literature and, while it is seriously flawed atnumerous levels, there is much within its pagesthat should prove useful.

Unmasking L.A. is an odd volume, one thatpassed through significant personnel changesand mission revisions in the years leading up toits publication. (In the interest of full disclo-sure, I myself was a prospective contributorearly in the project, but subsequently withdrewowing to protracted communication interrup-tions with the then-editors.) This may accountfor the book’s apparent confusion: it is anedited volume in which seven of the fifteen

Book Reviews 101

contributions are either authored by or co-authored with the editor himself, in which apreponderance of academicians is pepperedwith the occasional artist and activist, and inwhich contemporary essays butt up againsthistorical curiosities.

The overall argument of the book is that LosAngeles, historically and even more so in itsglobalized incarnation, is a place in which anaffluent, white, First World lives interspersedwith, and lords over, a host of impoverishedimmigrant and minority Third Worlds. Whilein no way a new claim, Unmasking L.A. is thefirst scholarly volume to take this claim as itscentral theme. Further, the book asserts that therealities of this divided L.A. are commonlyconcealed beneath a plethora of boosterishutopian and romantic dystopian myths aboutL.A. Such myths are as endemic to scholarly asto popular writing about L.A., and this bookclaims to be ‘‘one of the first’’ to strip thisdiscursive mask from the city’s exploitativelydichotomous face so as to ‘‘bridge the ex-tremes—the differences—that, at present, keepthe city polarized’’ (p. 14). As a lifelong observerof and participant in Los Angeles, I am inagreement with both Sawhney’s characteriza-tion of L.A. and his mission to do somethingabout it. But as a long-term writer on and readerof writings about L.A., I am less convinced ofthe novelty of Sawhney’s project: for well over adecade now there has been a growing list ofmeasured and very unboosterish macroanalyti-cal edited volumes (e.g., Klein and Schiesl 1991;Dear, Schockman, and Hise 1996) and inti-mately scaled monographs (e.g., Ruddick 1996)that do precisely what Sawhney asserts has yet tobe done. (I must also emphasize my owndissatisfaction with the all-too-common use of‘‘Third World’’ exclusively as a metaphor thatsignifies sites of colonially inflicted poverty,corruption and chaos. How soon we seem tohave forgotten that Third, nonaligned world ofthe Bandung Conference, the aspiration to-wards an explicitly articulated and empoweringalternative to the imperial plutocracy of theFirst World and the imperial bureaucracy ofthe Second.)

Novel or not, the question remains of whetherthe volume accomplishes its tasks, and theanswer is no and yes. Overall, the volume ishobbled by a seeming absence of organization.Two extraordinary chapters providing a quirky

yet solid historical base, one written by MorrowMayo in the 1930s and the other by theSituationist International following the WattsRiots, appear at the volume’s rear. Meanwhile,further up front, the reader will find a selectionof moving Jimmy Santiago Baca poems speakingfrom the city’s Latino working class, adjacent toa Norman Klein piece on interpreting globallyinduced urban amnesia that oscillates betweenthe inspired and the obscure. This seemingdisorder is underscored by the tables that pop upbetween chapters throughout the book, provid-ing translations of the volume’s title into somefour dozen different languages. Mysteriously,these translations include Albanian, Wolof, andLatin, yet neglect such relatively commonAngeleno tongues as Vietnamese, Thai, andYoruba. And what is the reader to gain fromknowing how to say ‘‘Unmasking L.A.’’ in Latinto begin with?

The contributions themselves are similarlyerratic in their impact, as exemplified bySawhney’s own pieces. Throughout the volumehe forcefully reiterates the conjoined themes ofintraurban First World/Third World divisionsand their dissimulation, and he rightly linksthese to the persistence of colonialist practicespast and present with great conviction andeloquence. But these themes are presentedlargely as broad characterizations repeatedlyasserted, and far too infrequently as hypothesesworthy of investigation and elaboration. Hisintroduction is most problematic in this regard,in which a panoply of familiar sunshine and noirdepictions of L.A. are simultaneously debunkedand mobilized, slogan-like, as evidence of thecity’s socioeconomic divide. But his transcriptsof dialogues with such heavy-hitters as MikeDavis, Deepak Chopra, and Gayatri Chakra-vorty Spivak likewise run up against thispredilection for overarching, preconceived ab-stractions. Thus the Chopra conversationquickly falls into caricatures of Angelenos asspiritual seekers versus Angelenos as shallowmaterialists, while Spivak puts up quite a fight tokeep her conversation focused upon the specifi-cities of local divergences and everyday lives.

While Sawhney can be frustrating as anauthor and interviewer, he proves himself amaster in the selection and editing of others. Inaddition to the historical contributions men-tioned previously, this volume includes anumber of survey-style chapters that are both

102 Volume 55, Number 1, February 2003

engaging and instructive. Christian Parenti’sexamination of L.A.’s prison-industrial com-plex is particularly inspired, illuminating itstopic through the life experiences of those whoare continuously cycled back and forth betweenthe streets of L.A. and its penal outposts.Equally powerful are Joseph Nevins’ double-barreled deployment of L.A.’s Mexican historyin conjunction with current immigration law tothoroughly deconstruct the odious notion of‘‘illegal’’ human beings, and Roger Keil’striangulation of concrete events with mediatedrepresentations to map the present and futureof L.A. as both a metaphorical disaster area andan area of study. In fact, Keil’s chapter wouldhave made an excellent conclusion for thevolume, and serves to counter the moresimplistic equations of L.A. scholarship withL.A. boosterism made elsewhere in the volume.

Unmasking L.A. sits uncertainly in anindefinite somewhere between compilationand monograph, a polemic bundled up withempirical studies and artistic aspirations. Agrab-bag of a book filled with surveys, critiques,interviews, poems, and other assorted sundries,the volume offers something for everybody(and, in my opinion, a thing or two not likely tobe for much of anybody). As to whether or not itoffers enough to satisfy any single somebody, Ican only suggest that prospective readersbrowse through a copy and decide for them-selves. Key Words: globalization, Los Angeles,postcolonialism, Third World.

Literature CitedDear, M. J., H. E. Schockman, and G. Hise. 1996.

Rethinking Los Angeles. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Klein, N. M., and M. J. Schiesl. 1991. 20th-century Los

Angeles: Power, promotion, and social conflict. Clar-emont, CA: Regina.

Ruddick, S. M. 1996. Young and homeless in Hollywood:Mapping social identities. New York: Routledge.

Retire in Style: 50 Affordable Places AcrossAmerica. Warren R. Bland. Chester, NJ:Next Decade, Inc., 2002. xi and 281 pp.,maps, tables, and index. $22.95 paper (ISBN0-9700908-0-3).

Reviewed by Hubert B. Stroud, Department ofCriminology, Sociology, Social Work, andGeography, Arkansas State University, StateUniversity, AR.

According to a recent news poll, the top threedomestic issues for American adults are healthcare, education, and retirement security. Animportant part of the concern about retirementis to find a suitable place to spend thoseretirement years. Sooner or later we must alldecide where we will retire and how we willspend our time during what we hope will be avery interesting, productive, and relaxing partof our lives. Choosing a place for our retire-ment that is affordable, safe, and culturallyfulfilling can go a long way toward providingthe opportunity, at least, for a happy andrewarding retirement. As George Bland pointsout under the heading ‘‘Making the Decision toRelocate,’’ there are many reasons for notmoving at all. But those feeling a sense ofadventure may well desire to start the newphase of their life in a different location. Bland’sbook is written to help such people find a safe,friendly, and culturally stimulating place that isfree of the stresses often associated with the cityor town in which one works. I agree with theidea presented in the title that this book canreally help someone find a place where he or shecan ‘‘retire in style.’’

A long list of books and journal articles haveappeared in the literature in recent years that fallunder the general heading of retirement plan-ning. My book, The Promise of Paradise: Recrea-tional and Retirement Communities in the UnitedStates since 1950 (1995), is one example from along list of publications on the subject.I mention it only to point out the diversityof books that focus on recreation and retirement.I have spent much of my career researching andwriting about various aspects of recreational andretirement communities that were created byland development companies. These pre-plattedsubdivisions may or may not become real townsthat serve a retirement population. Bland’s book,along with several other recent publications, iscompletely different. The purpose of theseworks is to find the best places to which toretire and/or to devise a ranking of cities andtowns based on their suitability for retirement.Recent examples include America’s 100 BestPlaces to Retire (Fox 2000) and Retirement PlacesRated (Savageau 1999). These books rate or rankexisting cities and towns based on severalcriteria, including climate, cost of living, qualityof life, and crime rates. Bland’s book is similar tothese in that he assesses traditional or real cities

Book Reviews 103