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Join acclaimed historian and author Gregory Orfalea as he discusses his new book, "Angeleno Days:  An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics."

Though he has spent half of his life elsewhere, Orfalea has remained obsessed with Los Angeles. That "brutal, beautiful city along the Pacific sea" shaped him and led to a series of memoirs originally published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. These deeply moving pieces are gathered here together for the first time.

Populated with fascinating characters – the Angelenos of Orfalea's life – these essays tell the story of the author's trials. He returns to Los Angles to teach, trying to reconcile the LA of his childhood with the city he now faces. He takes on progressively more difficult and painful subjects, finally confronting the memories of the shocking tragedy that took the lives his father and sister.

With more than 400,000 Arab Americans in LA – probably surpassing Detroit as the largest contingent in America – Orfalea also explores his own community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq.

"Angeleno Days" takes the memoir and personal essay to rare heights. Orfalea is a deeply human writer who reveals not only what it means to be human in America now, but what it will take to remain human in the days to come. These essays soar, confound, reveal and strike at our senses and sensibilities, forcing us to think in new ways and to feel new things.