TRANSLATING LA: A Tour of the Rainbow...

TRANSLATING LA: A Tour of the Rainbow City by Peter Theroux (Norton: $12; 271 pp.). So many books have appeared in recent years that analyses of Los Angeles may soon be recognized as a literary genre. An Arabic translator and former literacy tutor, Peter Theroux brings an interesting perspective to his observations. Avoiding the extremes of both East Coast snobbery and Western boosterism, he sees the city as a colorful, if slightly malign, mosaic. The result is an entertaining, but hardly definitive, word on the city that seems to have become a Rorschach test for commentators.