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\n\u201cLOS ANGELES may be the ultimate city of our age.\u201d So begins the 20th century\u2019s most unjustly forgotten book on Los Angeles, written by one of its most unjustly forgotten writers of place. Christopher Rand\u2019s\u00a0Los Angeles: The Ultimate City\u00a0<\/em>appeared in 1967, published by Oxford University Press and built upon a trilogy of articles\u00a0The<\/em>New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>ran in October 1966. Rand began writing for that magazine in 1947, with a piece on the Americans, including himself, who spent World War II nearly unsupervised in Japanese-surrounded southeast China. His last piece for them appeared in 1968, the year he died \u2014 observations on the run-up to Mexico City\u2019s Olympics. For those 20 years, in his capacity as\u00a0The<\/em>New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s \u201cfar-flung correspondent,\u201d he strove to understand what seems, given such a truncated life and career, an unprecedented variety of places, including Hong Kong, Greece, Puerto Rico, Bethlehem, Cambridge, and again and again over the years his own hometown of Salisbury, Connecticut.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a great walker and a far wanderer,\u201d writes Wallace White in Rand\u2019s October 1968\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>obituary.<\/p>\n
\nOver more than 30 years, he traveled to almost every part of the world, doing most of his traveling on foot, in an attempt to learn and know that transcended any effort at mere reporting, and when he died, he was still involved in the search that had occupied most of his life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In\u00a0Grecian Calendar<\/em>, his 1962 book on a year\u2019s exploration of Greece (often conducted on its dusty roads and rocky trails), Rand himself illuminates this method:<\/p>\n
\nI have walked a good deal for years now. I have theories about why one should do it \u2014 that it is good for the health, is conducive to thought, makes one able to observe things close at hand, etc. \u2014 and I think all these arguments are sound, but the main point is simply that I enjoy walking; I feel calm and happy while doing it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
A few pages later, Rand extends his theory further: \u201cI claim that if one walks with any gusto one is respected by other walkers, and I even boast that it is a good thing, nationalistically, to have a few Americans walking about in far countries. It explodes the generalization that we have forgotten how.\u201d Still, he seems never to have fully identified with his homeland, not least because he spent so much of his career outside it: he left a reporting job at the\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>\u00a0in 1943, in his early 30s, for a post in China as a US Office of War Information correspondent. After the war, he continued reporting on China for the\u00a0New York Herald Tribune<\/em>\u00a0until 1951, by which point he had already begun his stretch at\u00a0The<\/em>New Yorker<\/em>, where he contributed 64 detailed, long-form essays \u2014 detailed and long-form even by\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s midcentury standard \u2014 each of them revealing, to him and to us, a new place, or a new aspect of a familiar one.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n