For the past hundred years Los Angeles has been the world’s pop-culture hotspot and served as a projection screen for that same world’s dreams and fantasies. But what is it like to grow up there? In his most personal book to date, Kevin McAleer writes about coming of age in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. This fourth-generation Angeleno revisits surfing, bodybuilding, movie stars, earthquakes and other L.A. archetypes that give the city its flashy reputation, yet he also evokes the odd melancholy beneath the town’s glossy surface. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and rapid social change, L.A. KID can be read as cultural history in novel form while also furnishing wider insight – often hilarious, sometimes not so funny – into the shaping of American manhood in the second half of the American century.

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Author: Kevin McAleer