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West of Eden: An American Place, by Jean Stein
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An epic, mesmerizing oral history of Hollywood and Los Angeles from the author of the contemporary classic Edie
Jean Stein transformed the art of oral history in her groundbreaking book Edie: American Girl, an indelible portrait of Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick, which was edited with George Plimpton. Now, in West of Eden, she turns to Los Angeles, the city of her childhood. Stein vividly captures a mythic cast of characters: their ambitions and triumphs as well as their desolation and grief.
These stories illuminate the bold aspirations of five larger-than-life individuals and their families. West of Eden is a work of history both grand in scale and intimate in detail. At the center of each family is a dreamer who finds fortune and strife in Southern California: Edward Doheny, the Wisconsin-born oil tycoon whose corruption destroyed the reputation of a U.S. president and led to his own son’s violent death; Jack Warner, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, who together with his brothers founded one of the world’s most iconic film studios; Jane Garland, the troubled daughter of an aspiring actress who could never escape her mother’s schemes; Jennifer Jones, an actress from Oklahoma who won the Academy Award at twenty-five but struggled with despair amid her fame and glamour. Finally, Stein chronicles the ascent of her own father, Jules Stein, an eye doctor born in Indiana who transformed Hollywood with the creation of an unrivaled agency and studio.
In each chapter, Stein paints a portrait of an outsider who pins his or her hopes on the nascent power and promise of Los Angeles. Each individual’s unyielding intensity pushes loved ones, especially children, toward a perilous threshold. West of Eden depicts the city that has projected its own image of America onto the world, in all its idealism and paradox. As she did in Edie, Jean Stein weaves together the personal recollections of an array of individuals to create an astonishing tapestry of a place like no other.
Praise for West of Eden
“Compulsively readable, capturing not just a vibrant part of the history of Los Angeles—that uniquely ‘American Place’ Stein refers to in her subtitle—but also the real drama of this town . . . It’s like being at an insider’s cocktail party where the most delicious gossip about the rich and powerful is being dished by smart people, such as Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, Arthur Miller and Dennis Hopper. . . . Mesmerizing.”—Los Angeles Times
“Perhaps the most surprising thing that emerges from this riveting book is a glimpse of what seems like deep truth. It’s possible that oral history as Stein practices it . . . is as close as we’re going to come to the real story of anything.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Enthralling . . . brings some of [L.A.’s] biggest personalities to life . . . As she did for Edie Sedgwick in Edie: American Girl, [Stein] harnesses a gossipy chorus of voices.”—Vogue
“Even if you’re a connoisseur of Hollywood tales, you’ve probably never heard these. . . . As ever, gaudy, debauched, merciless Hollywood has the power to enthrall its audience.”—The Wall Street Journal
“The tales of jaw-dropping excess, cruelty, and betrayal are the stuff of movies, and the pleasures are immense.”—Vanity Fair
“This riveting oral history chronicles the development of Los Angeles, from oil boomtown to Tinseltown.”—Entertainment Weekly (“Must List”)
- Sales Rank: #45666 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-09
- Released on: 2016-02-09
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.14" w x 6.62" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
51 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
Unhappy families
By Phelps Gates
While reading this, I was continually reminded of Tolstoy's well-known sentence "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The families in the book enjoyed fabulous wealth and their members often had rewarding and creative careers, but oh, brother... what unhappiness! Murder, suicide, mental illness, financial disasters, etc., etc. You name it. The only exception was Jean Stein's own family, and perhaps that's just because she didn't talk about it (and even for them there was a kidnapping threat). As a third-generation native of Los Angeles (since escaped), I'm perpetually amazed by the goings-on there. My father was a reporter in Los Angeles in the thirties, and he used to regale us with stories of the rich and famous and their quirks. Stein's book gives us a fascinating picture, with all the important gossip, in a rather unusual format: quotations (often less than a page) from people who actually were there are cleverly strung together in a way that draws the reader inexorably along. Read it, then read some Raymond Chandler, and then go see L.A. Confidential.
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
West of Eden: An American Place
By Brendan Moody
The new oral history by Jean Stein has been a long time in the making. In fact, many of the subjects Stein interviewed are now dead. That only adds to the air of melancholy in this dark chronicle of five Hollywood families whose glamour was exceeded only by their tragedy. From the Dohenies, who were behind the oil boom that made Southern California, to the film mogul Warners, to families less well-known but equally fascinating, Stein reveals a world of opulence and emotional cruelty, with a particular focus on how the children of the powerful struggled with parenting that could be as ruthless as any business practice. Stein structures her interview quotes to great effect, highlighting thematic overlap in a way that makes the book seem more than a collection of the five most dramatic stories she could find. The final chapter, dealing with her own family history, might seem self-indulgent, but in fact her father's history as an entertainment mogul dovetails neatly with the rest of the tapestry she's created.
West of Eden is not without minor structural flaws. The chapter on the Dohenies uses quotes from a historian to provide a clearer context for the personal recollections, and the absence of such grounding is noticeable in some of the later chapters, particularly that on the Warners. The Warner chapter muddles itself further by expanding from treatment of Jack Warner's behavior during the blacklist to a discussion of that period more generally, which includes some worthwhile material but doesn't increase our understanding of that period enough to warrant the excursion. Occasionally one suspects that Stein has included a quote from a famous person more for the sake of having her in the contributor list than because she has much of substance to say. There are brief contributor biographies at the end of the book, but family trees in each section would have helped enormously to clarify who is who. But overall this is an extraordinary work, conversational yet haunting, earthy without being trite or lurid. The oral history format, in which different voices give contradictory accounts and the author-as-God can offer no final clarification, is used to explore the line between legend and reality and the impossibility of ever really knowing how another person's mind works. Perhaps the digressions are part of the point: life lacks the clean lines and definitive answers of fiction. The only certainties are decay and death, and West of Eden is about the persistence of that fact even in the lives of the very powerful.
31 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
No Temptation To Visit This Eden
By PETER KING
It is only February but this book already earns my award as the most boring, pretentious, irritating and uninteresting book of the year and I hasten to add that I am a great movie lover.
The structure, if I may dignify the book with this term, is confusing beyond belief. Every single page necessitates referring to the end of the book to ascertain who the person quoted is and what he or she did. Having done this umpteen times you will find that you have never heard of the vast majority of these people and never want to hear about them again. A random example: "Gayle Chelgren is the niece of Hugh Plunkett". Don't bother to look up Hugh Plunkett even if you wanted to; there is no indication as to who he is or was. But the prime So What? example is "Anson Lisk's aunt, Lucy Marceline Smith Doheny, was the first wife of Edward L. Doheny, Jr.".
The dust jacket claims that the book creates "an astonishing tapestry of voices..." Substitute "cacophony" for "tapestry" and I would agree.
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