Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee

By Penelope Grenoble O'Malley and Penelope B. Grenoble

Book Overview

Combining environmental history, personal memoir and a view on the complicated relationship between humans and the landscapes they destroy by loving them too much, this book is a warning beacon highlighting how it is that a lifestyle, however alluring, can be made precarious by the very natural forces that creates its charm. This diary is a provocative exploration of the tenuous interface between the urban and wild worlds, and of the nature of community in an increasingly profit-oriented society.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874175666
• ISBN13: 9780874175660
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

You can't see the beach for all the squabbles

The author of MALIBU DIARY, Penelope O'Malley, moved to that beach town in 1986, an urban refugee from deeper inside the Los Angeles city sprawl, and stayed until the late 90s. The book wouldn't have caught my eye or caused me to crack open my wallet except that I lived my formative years in Malibu - Zuma Canyon to be exact - from 1957 at age 8 to my departure thirteen years later, about the same length of time as Penelope's residence on Point Dume just across the Pacific Coast Highway. Despite her relatively late arrival, I hoped she'd tell me something I'd missed during the flood of teenage hormones. Five years after O'Malley's arrival, Malibu removed itself from the governance of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and incorporated. Thus enabled, the citizenry began a period - still continuing to the present, I presume - of interminable tiffs, which is the subject of Penelope's "diary". There is some useful historical perspective to be derived from the narrative, specifically a thumbnail history of the 17,000-acre Rancho Malibu Topanga y Sequit, one of the last intact Spanish land grants, as purchased by Frederick Hastings Rindge in 1892 and lost piecemeal by his descendents until only 4,000 acres remained under family control in 1961. Also, Malibu's unfortunate and regular association with major wildfires is briefly recounted, including the author's first-hand experiences with such in 1993 and 1996. (In 1958, I watched as the Liberty fire crested the mountains at the north end of Zuma Canyon. My Dad spent a good part of that night's wee hours serving refreshments to fire crews parked on the canyon's access road awaiting the blaze's expected approach. It never happened; the wind shifted.) Otherwise, MALIBU DIARY is a narrative about disputes: residents sniping at the county fire department for it's handling of brushfires; a home builder locked in a legal battle with two competing and mutually antagonistic representatives of the Chumash Indian tribe over potential artifacts to be found on his construction site; the City of Malibu's stubborn row with L.A. County on which government entity should repair and reopen Kanan Dume Road, a major trans-mountain artery to the San Fernando Valley, after it was blocked by a landslide; the grotty warfare between adherents of the existing septic tank method of waste disposal and proponents of a new, city-wide sewer system. And perhaps the most rancorous and intractable of them all, the feud between wannabe developers of condominiums and apartment buildings, who cloak themselves in the sacred banner of "individual property rights", and the entrenched "slow growth" advocates of single-family dwellings that occupy the local high ground. Such is this particular piece of Paradise at the rural/(sub)urban interface. It brings to mind the volume by social commentator and essayist Barbara Holland, Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village, in which she describes taking up re