Walking the line between fact and fiction, this book can’t be called a straight-up history (despite what Verso says). But it is a serious sociological study of the city and its mythomaniac pathologies. Norman M. Klein’s method, which at one point involves imagining Walter Benjamin in L.A., raises what could have been a much drier tome into the rarefied realm of those books that weave together — in this case, with a brilliant sense of invention — the lyrical and the essayistic.