by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 26, 2009

It's a book unlike any other. It's a history of Los Angeles - and California, and America - that traces an American family through three generations. The final generation includes Dennis and Brian Wilson, who founded "The Beach Boys." But the book devotes equal time to the broken Americans dreams that had haunted their parents and grandparents - and which ultimately left a shadow hanging over them in the 1960s.

The inside cover of the book shows a reproduction of a 1929 map from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and in fact, the book traces an entire century of history, thanks to the obsessive research of author Timothy White. He worked as both the editor of Billboard magazine and the senior editor at Rolling Stone, and he's takes the roots of pop culture more seriously than anyone. White titled his book "The Nearest Faraway Place," but its subtitle promises it covers both the Beach Boys and "the Southern California Experience." And it offers fascinating glimpses of the sunshine state as it was starting to grow.

"The prewar years were a profitable era for the sheet metal business," begins one typical paragraph, "with U.S. Army camps and recruitment centers...in need of large-scale kitchen facilities and custom appliances." White is tracing the socioeconomic trends that led to the middle-class success of "Love's Sheet Metal shop," setting the stage for the boyhood friendship between Love's children and the Wilson's children. Ultimately Mike Love (with the Wilson brothers) would become a founding member of the Beach Boys. But with painstaking detail, the book shows their parents struggles with 1950s capitalism, as Murry Wilson hopes through a series of positions and broken dreams before founding an unglamorous machinery-leasing business.

And the book's most compelling story deals with Murry's parents and grandparents.Though he lived in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1904 Murry's grandfather had purchased a vineyard in Escondido, California, which he worked with his two sons. "Come harvest, Buddy and Johnny filled an entire Santa Fe ice car with crates of the green table grapes, and they slept in a caboose as they accompanied the shipment back to Hutchinson for sale on the streets." But it loses money three years in a row, and eventually the family returns to "a life of steam-fitting supply, frigid Kansas winters, and the less lush uncertainties of what [Murry's grandfather] called 'the darn stubborn world.'"

White then publishes the text of a 1914 ad for Sunkist oranges, suggesting it doubled as a pitch for "sunny, tree-filled Southern California." And one generation later, Buddy Wilson apparently inherits the same unfulfilled dream. Struggling to support five children, he travels to California to seek work, then sends the family a telegram and $200 for train fare. ("These children barely knew their daddy since he had been home so little in the last few years..." White reports.) They take a three-day journey by steam locomotive to the unglamorous oil fields of Huntington Beach. And "never did Edith Wilson imagine her family would one day have to leave Hutchinson
to go and live in...a tent."

White's read the newspaper headlines from March of 1914. He's identified the sermon that was read in church that Sunday. But most importantly, he's sketched the details of a lost American dream. Yes, it brought the Wilson family to California, and ultimately lead to beautiful harmonies extolling the carefree life of a beach-loving teenager. But the real history of California - and the whole Wilson family - is much more complicated.

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