"An Urban Odyssey" Goes Local

I am pleased to share with you a review of my recently published book by Malibu’s preeminent chronicler and a city conscience, Suzanne Guldimann, gratuitously timed for a signing at the Pt. Dume Clubhouse Saturday, Dec.7.

The proceeds of the 10 to Noon event open to all at 29500 Heathercliff Rd. goes to benefit the venerable Malibu Town Council that since 1947 has been dutifully protecting our fragile seacoast environment from over development, at times a thankless task not without controversy.

The Council deserves our sincere appreciation and respect for, among many things, the dogged force behind the city’s incorporation in 1994 to most recently rallying residents to block a planning disaster of a mid city motel/hotel proposed by an avaricious development team.

The review by Suzanne, herself an accomplished author (her books on Malibu are warmly recommended) appeared in the Topanga New Times. Well written, edited, and designed, the hybrid publication is an engaging resource of local news, relevant features and culture for Malibu’s neighboring canyon.

As such, it is a welcoming celebration of what makes Topanga a singular persevering community, the New Times a paradigm for other such media efforts, and as such I am particularly pleased and honored that the review of my book is included in the current issue. Here it is shamelessly reprinted:

“Sam Hall Kaplan is a longtime Malibu resident and activist as well as having had a seven-decade career in media and urban planning.

“An Urban Odyssey” is an autobiography and a critique of urban planning, beginning with Kaplan’s earliest memories of communal space on the stoop of the Brooklyn apartment house that was his childhood home. Kaplan recounts his experiences as a journalist, teacher, media consultant, and urban planner, with a focus on how people shape the urban landscape.

“There are anecdotes here on what life was like in the New York Times newsroom when print journalism was at its apex, reflections on his cross-country drive to Los Angeles, where he went to work for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1970s and a first-person account of the devastating 2018 Woolsey Fire, that the author experienced at his home in Malibu.

“This is an engaging and highly readable memoir, written with the author’s characteristic acerbic wit. Whether or not one agrees with the author’s views on urban planning, his book offers a look at an extraordinary life, well lived. www.academicstudiespress.com.”

My thanks again to Suzanne, who serves Malibu at present as a Park and Rec Commissioner, coincidentally a position I held a quarter of century ago.