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Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics
Though he has spent half of his life elsewhere, Gregory Orfalea has remained obsessed with Los Angeles. That “brutal, beautiful city along the Pacific sea” shaped him and led to a series of essays originally published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. These deeply moving pieces are gathered here together for the first time.
Populated with fascinating characters—the Angelenos of Orfalea’s life—these essays tell the story of the author’s trials. He returns to Los Angeles to teach, trying to reconcile the LA of his childhood with the city he now faces. He takes on progressively more difficult and painful subjects, finally confronting the memories of the shocking tragedy that took the lives of his father and sister.
With more than 400,000 Arab Americans in Los Angeles—probably surpassing Detroit as the largest contingent in America—Orfalea also explores his own community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq.
Angeleno Days takes the memoir and personal essay to rare heights. Orfalea is a deeply human writer who reveals not only what it means to be human in America now, but also what it will take to remain human in the days to come. These essays soar, confound, reveal, and strike at our senses and sensibilities, forcing us to think and feel in new ways.
Populated with fascinating characters—the Angelenos of Orfalea’s life—these essays tell the story of the author’s trials. He returns to Los Angeles to teach, trying to reconcile the LA of his childhood with the city he now faces. He takes on progressively more difficult and painful subjects, finally confronting the memories of the shocking tragedy that took the lives of his father and sister.
With more than 400,000 Arab Americans in Los Angeles—probably surpassing Detroit as the largest contingent in America—Orfalea also explores his own community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq.
Angeleno Days takes the memoir and personal essay to rare heights. Orfalea is a deeply human writer who reveals not only what it means to be human in America now, but also what it will take to remain human in the days to come. These essays soar, confound, reveal, and strike at our senses and sensibilities, forcing us to think and feel in new ways.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
Gregory Orfalea
16 books6 followersGregory Orfalea was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is the author of ten books, including Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California, published in January 2014 by Scribner.
With degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Alaska, Orfalea has published ten books, including a history of his father’s unit in World War II, Messengers of the Lost Battalion, and Angeleno Days, a memoir of growing up in Los Angeles, which won the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Prize in Creative Nonfiction. He is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Man Who Guarded the Bomb, as well as the seminal study, The Arab Americans: A History.
Orfalea directed a writing program at the Claremont Colleges and has taught at several universities, including his alma mater, Georgetown University and California Lutheran University. For the past six years (2010-2015) Orfalea has been writer-in-residence at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and director of its Creators of California speakers series.
In 2013, Orfalea visited Turkey and Armenia with the University of Iowa International Writers Program and the US State Department.
Orfalea and his wife have three sons. He divides his time between Santa Barbara and Washington, DC.
With degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Alaska, Orfalea has published ten books, including a history of his father’s unit in World War II, Messengers of the Lost Battalion, and Angeleno Days, a memoir of growing up in Los Angeles, which won the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Prize in Creative Nonfiction. He is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Man Who Guarded the Bomb, as well as the seminal study, The Arab Americans: A History.
Orfalea directed a writing program at the Claremont Colleges and has taught at several universities, including his alma mater, Georgetown University and California Lutheran University. For the past six years (2010-2015) Orfalea has been writer-in-residence at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and director of its Creators of California speakers series.
In 2013, Orfalea visited Turkey and Armenia with the University of Iowa International Writers Program and the US State Department.
Orfalea and his wife have three sons. He divides his time between Santa Barbara and Washington, DC.
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