A look at the art world in California, compiled from interviews with more than fifty California artists, including musicians, painters, writers, composers, and other artists, describes the way their various art forms have developed. This anthology features [edited] transcripts of conversations between art writer Isenberg (Making It Big, LJ 3/15/97) and 54 current or former West Coast artists, writers, actors, and composers in which they express their views of California and its affects on their lives and work. The commonality of living or having lived in the Golden State and the book's sheer number of interviews contribute to a more general, and perhaps unexpected, cumulative message: a defensive championing of the state's freer creative climate. Repeatedly, artists describe how the cultural and historical setting has permitted more experimentation than would be possible in New York. The whiff of regionalism here is not helped by the book's narrow Southern California bias, likely the result of Isenberg's L.A. Times reporter background. (Only a quarter of the artists come from north of Tehachapi.) The collection is saved by the interesting and eclectic variety of means with which these people have found their creative niches, as when Dave Brubeck explains the impact on his musical ear of the rhythms he heard (of horses, pumps) during his ranchland childhood. Although it fails to transcend its limitations, this is an illuminating book, best suited for West Coast and large art libraries.DDouglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., CA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Longtime arts reporter Isenberg brings her fascination with California culture, which is as diverse and impressive as the state's spectacular landscapes, to this collection of more than 50 interviews with writers, painters and sculptors, actors, musicians, photographers, and architects. Because less than half are natives, many artists talk about California as a mecca, or frontier. Matters of race and ethnicity; politics, history, and the environment; and the effect of place on creativity also play a large part in these lively and succinct discussions. Isenberg's articulate and magnetic subjects include such inevitable participants as Joan Didion, Dave Brubeck, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but she also presents sculptor Betye Saar, public muralist Judith Baca, playwright Luis Valdez, artist David Hockney, composer Michael Tilson Thomas, writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and, in the world of entertainment, Carol Burnett, Matt Groening, and Clint Eastwood. By interviewing artists of different generations, temperaments, and disciplines, Isenberg has created a vivid sampler of perspectives on California's unique and inspiring ambiance and its significant contribution to world culture. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "A remarkable job of catching these individual voices and mining for insights on the arts." -- Curtain Up "Probing interviews...plumbs the qualities of the Golden State that inspire those who were born or moved there." -- Time "Reading these interviews is like eavesdropping on the artists' ruminations." -- New York Times Book Review "The book is the single best example of how creativity inspires creativity in the hothouse environment of California." -- Los Angeles Times Barbara Isenberg has been writing about the arts for the Los Angeles Times since 1976 and is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Author of the critically acclaimed M aking It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical, she received a Distinguished Artists Award from the Los Angeles Music Center in 1991 and was a Getty Visiting Scholar in 1999-2000. She lives in Los Angeles.