What lies beneath

As any engaging cultural history should, "Brown Acres" illuminates the city's politics, landscape and ecology, especially through the labors of its municipal engineers. Sklar takes us through the painstakingly slow developments that led to the current award-winning sewer system. To call the process of building the underground network of pipes and ultimately a sewage treatment plant Herculean would be an understatement.

Sklar, the former public information director for the city's Department of Public Works, lingers on the topic that makes this book so timely: the environmental impact of a century of ineffective sewage treatment and the efforts of activists to clean up Santa Monica Bay, the dumping ground for much of the city's waste since 1894. She also discusses L.A.'s historic lack of foresight in municipal planning and notes that its current struggle with drought could be helped by recycling the hundreds of millions of gallons of treated wastewater it produces each day.

-- Chris Daley