The City at Stake: Secession, Reform and the Battle for Los Angeles. By Raphael J. Sonenshein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 328p. $39.50.

Unlike any other city in recent years, Los Angeles has been the subject of grand theorizing in urban studies, so much so that many write of an “L.A. school” of urban theory. With its sprawl, smog, postindustrial economy, and postmodern architecture, this California city is often presented as an ideal-type representation of urbanized, globalized dystopia. While some of the studies of the L.A. school are useful, they are too often impressionistic and imprecise, pitched at an unsatisfying level of abstraction. In contrast, Raphael Sonenshein's detailed and empirical study is a useful and refreshing antidote, and when paired alongside his 1993 book, Politics in Black and White, serves as the definitive account of the city's political history since the 1970s.