For Lee Siegel, such bluster is a dispiriting sign of the times: no engagement, no freewheeling back-and-forth—the sine qua non of a healthy intellectual life—just a mischievous jape about seeing the critic in the dock. (In fact, speaking of freewheeling back-and-forth, Mr. Siegel recently endured a dose of public censure and was temporarily suspended from The New Republic—all as a result of his dodgy blogging antics in the midst of a cyberspace contretemps.) Mr. Siegel thinks that for a critic, giving offense is part of the deal. He’s happy to hold up his end, but the rest of us keep letting him down.

Feeling pretty gloomy about the cultural scene, he mounts a sweeping indictment of his contemporaries, dismissing along the way a generation or two of artists, writers and critics. Though he doesn’t name names—which weakens his case—the charges are as follows: an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments. Bohemia is just another subsidiary of the Very Big Corporation, Inc.; its motto: “Get your own, and get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an optimistic air.”

The obstacles to unfettered imagination are everywhere: reality TV, memoirs galore, novels propped up by historical “research” (The Da Vinci Code)—all examples of a culture afflicted by a pernicious “art-suspicion.” Fewer and fewer people are willing to submit to the genuinely made-up, to put themselves “in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist.”

His complaint is not new: “It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media,” he fumes, “or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts in direct consultation with gallery owners and book and magazine editors.” Enough of that, he declares: “The critic’s passion should be to expose the shams, the false consciousness, the cleverly accommodating patter that are turning expedience into culture …. [The critic] interprets the work under scrutiny almost as if it were a lesson in freedom, or in some of the ways of being, or not being, free.”

There’s a touch of immodesty—not to say melodrama—to all this hand-wringing: Mr. Siegel as the lonely, embattled man of letters, telling us all like it is, or how it should be, because no one else has the good sense to do so. As for the charge that the cultural world has been corrupted by business values, I’m not sure if this is entirely true. Unless you’re a Jeff Koons (O.K., a fraud) or a Philippe de Montebello or a Jonathan Safran Foer, or a hustling freelancer who writes for high-minded glossies (Lee Siegel, for example), making a living in arts or letters is, trust me, plenty hard, so two cheers for a little entrepreneurial zeal.

Not that he would care either way, but liking Lee Siegel is a bit difficult. You just can’t win with this guy: You either a) don’t get it or b) are part of the problem or c) are obsequiously climbing the ranks. Still, I’m going to go right ahead and praise him. No better, more important collection of criticism than Falling Upwards has been published this year. There’s plenty to deplore out there, and Mr. Siegel hates all the right tendencies—the fatuous reductionism of queer literary theory, the subject of a long essay that showcases Mr. Siegel’s forensic grasp of post-structuralism’s bad habits, or the phony pieties and even worse prose of Barbara Kingsolver, who writes books for people impressed with their own rectitude. Ms. Kingsolver fancies herself a serious writer who grapples with weighty, geopolitical issues, but she’s merely a lightweight who peddles “a potpourri of tried-and-true soppy attitudes that are attached, with demographic precision, to an array of popular causes.” That’s right on.

In the essays themselves, collected mostly from Harper’s, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Siegel airs his themes with more grace and subtlety than he does in his heavy-handed introduction. In a brilliant appraisal of Saul Bellow, for example, Mr. Siegel uses the career of James Atlas and his ill-fated decision to write Bellow’s biography—a project Mr. Atlas had no business undertaking—as a gauge of careerism in the literary world. Siegel notes that Mr. Atlas was once a fine literary journalist, but he chucked all that aside, becoming an incredibly crass, status-obsessed charlatan with no concern whatsoever for genuine literary value. The Bellow biography proved to be his undoing. Mr. Siegel wonders whether Mr. Atlas was “driven insane by his subject’s cosmic laughter”—whether Bellow’s “wildness,” his “demonic vitality,” could have “curdled” Mr. Atlas’ spirit.

“Demonic vitality”: Mr. Siegel’s criterion for artistic worth invariably turns on such terms. He’s here to tell you that good art—art that matters—is necessarily unruly, unbound by dogma or programmatic concerns. (Can’t be reminded of this too often.) What raises his hackles is “screwing a utilitarian handle on the imagination.” Embracing his inner Lionel Trilling, who famously endorsed “variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty,” Mr. Siegel applauds “‘high’ art” and its “saving complexities”: “Art and literature humanize us into enduring life’s paradoxes and ambiguities, its setbacks, calamities, and disappointments.”

For all of Mr. Siegel’s love of great writers—D.H. Lawrence, Dante and Jane Austen, subject of a tender and original piece of criticism—he’s hardly a Harold Bloom bloviating about the canon. Mr. Siegel is a zigzagging cultural omnivore: He takes on Harry Potter (a hearty thumbs-up), The Sopranos (ditto), and Sex and The City (not buying it). He’s what you might call a confrontational enthusiast. Ever skeptical when a unanimous round of yays or nays goes up, he’s an expert demolisher of critical group-think. On the acclaimed Richard Yates, an important influence on Richard Ford, André Dubus, Richard Russo and Tobias Wolff, among others, Mr. Siegel shows how misguided it is to glibly compare Yates to Hemingway (standard critical M.O.); rather, Yates brought fiction back to naturalism, “from the drama of free will back to the crisis of determining circumstances.”

Two of the best pieces in Falling Upwards—one on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the other on socialist realist painting—show how unpredictable a critic Mr. Siegel is. In the latter, he turns art history upside down, showing how misguided critics have been about a genre wrongly derided as meretricious propaganda. It’s a loving, well-argued bit of advocacy that had me scrambling to get to a museum. As for Eyes Wide Shut, you might think Mr. Siegel would have been a part of the anti-hype brigade that attacked all the gushing about Nicole and Tom that attended the film’s opening. Nope: Mr. Siegel convincingly argues the critics failed to see an authentic example of movie art.

All of this combativeness can make you weary, but he closes his book with a lovely, almost gentle meditation on Chekhov. Still, he can’t resist getting in a few jabs at the conventions of lit-crit. For Lee Siegel, the dukes are always up.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

For Lee Siegel, such bluster is a dispiriting sign of the times: no engagement, no freewheeling back-and-forth—the sine qua non of a healthy intellectual life—just a mischievous jape about seeing the critic in the dock. (In fact, speaking of freewheeling back-and-forth, Mr. Siegel recently endured a dose of public censure and was temporarily suspended from The New Republic—all as a result of his dodgy blogging antics in the midst of a cyberspace contretemps.) Mr. Siegel thinks that for a critic, giving offense is part of the deal. He’s happy to hold up his end, but the rest of us keep letting him down.

Feeling pretty gloomy about the cultural scene, he mounts a sweeping indictment of his contemporaries, dismissing along the way a generation or two of artists, writers and critics. Though he doesn’t name names—which weakens his case—the charges are as follows: an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments. Bohemia is just another subsidiary of the Very Big Corporation, Inc.; its motto: “Get your own, and get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an optimistic air.”

The obstacles to unfettered imagination are everywhere: reality TV, memoirs galore, novels propped up by historical “research” ( The Da Vinci Code)—all examples of a culture afflicted by a pernicious “art-suspicion.” Fewer and fewer people are willing to submit to the genuinely made-up, to put themselves “in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist.”

His complaint is not new: “It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media,” he fumes, “or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts in direct consultation with gallery owners and book and magazine editors.” Enough of that, he declares: “The critic’s passion should be to expose the shams, the false consciousness, the cleverly accommodating patter that are turning expedience into culture …. [The critic] interprets the work under scrutiny almost as if it were a lesson in freedom, or in some of the ways of being, or not being, free.”

There’s a touch of immodesty—not to say melodrama—to all this hand-wringing: Mr. Siegel as the lonely, embattled man of letters, telling us all like it is, or how it should be, because no one else has the good sense to do so. As for the charge that the cultural world has been corrupted by business values, I’m not sure if this is entirely true. Unless you’re a Jeff Koons (O.K., a fraud) or a Philippe de Montebello or a Jonathan Safran Foer, or a hustling freelancer who writes for high-minded glossies (Lee Siegel, for example), making a living in arts or letters is, trust me, plenty hard, so two cheers for a little entrepreneurial zeal.

Not that he would care either way, but liking Lee Siegel is a bit difficult. You just can’t win with this guy: You either a) don’t get it or b) are part of the problem or c) are obsequiously climbing the ranks. Still, I’m going to go right ahead and praise him. No better, more important collection of criticism than Falling Upwards has been published this year. There’s plenty to deplore out there, and Mr. Siegel hates all the right tendencies—the fatuous reductionism of queer literary theory, the subject of a long essay that showcases Mr. Siegel’s forensic grasp of post-structuralism’s bad habits, or the phony pieties and even worse prose of Barbara Kingsolver, who writes books for people impressed with their own rectitude. Ms. Kingsolver fancies herself a serious writer who grapples with weighty, geopolitical issues, but she’s merely a lightweight who peddles “a potpourri of tried-and-true soppy attitudes that are attached, with demographic precision, to an array of popular causes.” That’s right on.

In the essays themselves, collected mostly from Harper’s, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Siegel airs his themes with more grace and subtlety than he does in his heavy-handed introduction. In a brilliant appraisal of Saul Bellow, for example, Mr. Siegel uses the career of James Atlas and his ill-fated decision to write Bellow’s biography—a project Mr. Atlas had no business undertaking—as a gauge of careerism in the literary world. Siegel notes that Mr. Atlas was once a fine literary journalist, but he chucked all that aside, becoming an incredibly crass, status-obsessed charlatan with no concern whatsoever for genuine literary value. The Bellow biography proved to be his undoing. Mr. Siegel wonders whether Mr. Atlas was “driven insane by his subject’s cosmic laughter”—whether Bellow’s “wildness,” his “demonic vitality,” could have “curdled” Mr. Atlas’ spirit.

“Demonic vitality”: Mr. Siegel’s criterion for artistic worth invariably turns on such terms. He’s here to tell you that good art—art that matters—is necessarily unruly, unbound by dogma or programmatic concerns. (Can’t be reminded of this too often.) What raises his hackles is “screwing a utilitarian handle on the imagination.” Embracing his inner Lionel Trilling, who famously endorsed “variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty,” Mr. Siegel applauds “‘high’ art” and its “saving complexities”: “Art and literature humanize us into enduring life’s paradoxes and ambiguities, its setbacks, calamities, and disappointments.”

For all of Mr. Siegel’s love of great writers—D.H. Lawrence, Dante and Jane Austen, subject of a tender and original piece of criticism—he’s hardly a Harold Bloom bloviating about the canon. Mr. Siegel is a zigzagging cultural omnivore: He takes on Harry Potter (a hearty thumbs-up), The Sopranos (ditto), and Sex and The City (not buying it). He’s what you might call a confrontational enthusiast. Ever skeptical when a unanimous round of yays or nays goes up, he’s an expert demolisher of critical group-think. On the acclaimed Richard Yates, an important influence on Richard Ford, André Dubus, Richard Russo and Tobias Wolff, among others, Mr. Siegel shows how misguided it is to glibly compare Yates to Hemingway (standard critical M.O.); rather, Yates brought fiction back to naturalism, “from the drama of free will back to the crisis of determining circumstances.”

Two of the best pieces in Falling Upwards—one on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the other on socialist realist painting—show how unpredictable a critic Mr. Siegel is. In the latter, he turns art history upside down, showing how misguided critics have been about a genre wrongly derided as meretricious propaganda. It’s a loving, well-argued bit of advocacy that had me scrambling to get to a museum. As for Eyes Wide Shut, you might think Mr. Siegel would have been a part of the anti-hype brigade that attacked all the gushing about Nicole and Tom that attended the film’s opening. Nope: Mr. Siegel convincingly argues the critics failed to see an authentic example of movie art.

All of this combativeness can make you weary, but he closes his book with a lovely, almost gentle meditation on Chekhov. Still, he can’t resist getting in a few jabs at the conventions of lit-crit. For Lee Siegel, the dukes are always up.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

The political wags tell us we’re living in a new Gilded Age, so it’s probably a good time to check in with the old—but be advised that these two biographical whoppers about a pair of industrial Andrews from the first Gilded Age aren’t for the faint of wrist. David Nasaw’s sober, methodical life of the pint-sized plutocrat (Andrew Carnegie was just a notch over five feet tall) weighs in at 878 pages; while David Cannadine’s brisker Mellon: An American Life is only a touch shorter.

That’s an awful lot of pages, but these Pittsburgh powerhouses helped define and shape an epoch of American capitalism when this country actually made things (who’s the Chinese Carnegie?), when Steel Town was true to its name—a belching, soot-covered mess otherwise known as “hell with the lid off.” Carnegie, a bumptious little Scotsman who swaggered as if he were twice his size, soared with iron and steel, smashing unions along the way—Carnegie’s tactic was to conciliate, then crush—as he piled up a vast fortune; when he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan in 1901, he walked away with $120 billion (in 2006 dollars), which he used to underwrite a hodgepodge of philanthropic causes, foundations and charitable trusts. (Next time you walk by a branch of the New York Public Library, thank Mr. Carnegie). A self-taught, self-righteous know-it-all, he lectured the world—like George Soros, he wouldn’t ever shut up—in his voluminous writings on many topics, counseled the rich to give away their money, and embarked on a quixotic campaign to bring about world peace, even if part of the Carnegie fortune came from the U.S. Navy, which bought armor plates manufactured in Carnegie mills.

The life of Andrew Mellon offers a prim study in contrast with his fellow western Pennsylvania capitalist. Whereas Carnegie was a sunny extrovert, Mellon was a shy, pallid, unfunny, emotionally stunted man who loathed the spotlight. He was no activist, nor was he, as Mr. Nasaw writes of Carnegie, a “moral philosopher of industrial capitalism.”

An entrepreneur of genius, Mellon let his endeavors speak for themselves. Mellon money helped kick-start everything from Alcoa to Gulf Oil, and flowed through almost every sector of the American economy, from banking to gas, metals and mining. A discerning, indefatigable art collector, he was the driving force in the creation of the National Gallery. In his three terms as a tax-cutting Secretary of the Treasury, he saw the 20’s roar (even if he didn’t), then crash. Unjustly vilified by F.D.R., he is today a hero of the supply side gang—Mellon was, you might say, a supply-sider avant la Laffer.

On balance, Mr. Cannadine’s volume is the more fluent of these two supremely fair and judicious books. Mr. Cannadine is chattier and more unbuttoned, while Mr. Nasaw is a dry, austere, somewhat plodding stylist. But Carnegie was the far more interesting man—and how couldn’t he be? There are more knots to untie in Carnegie than there are in 10 men. In its broad outline, the life of Andrew Carnegie is the immigrant success story writ fabulously large, and it’s got Horatio Alger beat by a mile.

Born in 1835, at 12 he arrived in Pittsburgh as a dropout, but he was a canny operator and an aggressive go-getter. From telegraph boy to superintendent on the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie gathered up a clutch of important contacts that would be instrumental in his early rise. He had instinct for infrastructure, and he built his early fortune on a welter of insider deals and secret partnerships that make one’s head spin. During and after the Civil War, the United States went railroad mad, and Carnegie was there, providing rails, wheels, steel bridges and just about everything else to keep the trains running.

Today, much of this activity would be illegal: “Carnegie survived and triumphed in an environment rife with cronyism and corruption,” Mr. Nasaw writes. Way back when, Carnegie would have been denounced as a robber baron—even now, say “Andrew Carnegie” in a union hall and you’ll probably get decked—but Mr. Nasaw is too subtle a historian to see Carnegie in such crude terms. Conversely, Mr. Nasaw doesn’t lionize him as a hero of capitalism either. (He’ll be hearing from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board about that.) Rather, Mr. Nasaw, without cheap point-scoring, carefully undercuts Carnegie’s sometimes blind estimate of his own actions: We see him as driven, perhaps deluded, an impish mass of contradictions.

By his mid-30’s, having decamped to Manhattan and sitting on a pile of loot, he resolved to give away all his money. Yet his good intentions turned him into a rather nasty capitalist; with apologies to Balzac, there may have been no great crime behind his fortune, but there were certainly a lot of ill-gotten gains. Carnegie became a man possessed, hell-bent on increasing revenues to fund his ecstatic visions. As Mr. Nasaw makes clear, part of the problem with Carnegie is that he fancied himself a disinterested sage who transcended all class and interest: Carnegie believed he could be a friend to the workingman, a selfless captain of industry and public philosopher all at once. But squaring this circle would prove nearly impossible.

If Carnegie believed the community created riches—a position he outlined in his famous “Gospel of Wealth” articles—he also believed that the community should have no role in its disposal. This awesome task would fall on the shoulders of the all-knowing retired capitalist (i.e., Carnegie) acting as a wise trustee. It was a thoroughly paternalist vision that set Carnegie on a collision course with the unions—they had no role in his scheme—and culminated in the showdown at the state-of-the-art Homestead, Penn., steelworks in 1892, one of the nastiest confrontations between capital and labor in American history. (To the men working in his plants, Carnegie effectively said: I’ll break your union, but take a library as a consolation prize.)

Carnegie’s reputation suffered terribly after the Homestead riots, yet he pressed on undeterred until his death in 1919. Mr. Nasaw’s Carnegie is a man of enormous energy—and enormous conceit. His gifts to the world—free tuition for Scottish university students; the Carnegie libraries; the famous music hall on 57th Street; research institutions; sundry endowments and bequests—were extraordinary, yet his hard-charging ways rankled many. In his campaign for world peace, which consumed his late years, he turned himself into a full-time pest, bombarding Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft with cables and letters, even telling them how to conduct their diplomacy. An infuriated T.R. fumed that “if Andrew Carnegie had employed his fortune and his time in doing justice to the steelworkers who gave him his fortune, he would have accomplished a thousand times what he has accomplished or ever can accomplish in connection with international peace.”

NO LOUD PROCLAMATIONS FROM THE AUSTERE Mellon, no running off in a thousand directions, no theoretical hobbyhorses and very few wrinkles; there’s nearly no there there. One wit said of Mellon that he looked like “a dried-up dollar bill that any wind might whisk away.” “He was a hollow man, with no interior life,” Mr. Cannadine concludes. “Mellon was a child of Mark Twain’s Gilded Age, though he disliked gilt.”

For all that, Mellon: An American Life is a surprisingly robust, even juicy look into the world of the dour Scotch-Irish G.O.P. Presbyterianism that profoundly shaped Mellon’s outlook. Mr. Cannadine gives ample space to Mellon’s stern father, “Judge” Thomas Mellon, son of a farmer and founder of T. Mellon & Sons bank, the seed of Mellon empire; Andrew’s disastrous marriage; and his strained relations with his children, Ailsa and Paul (the ever-bitter son)—all of which makes the book something of a group portrait.

Born in 1855, as a young man Mellon took the family bank and expanded and consolidated it: swallowing up other banks, seeking out alliances with the cash-hungry innovators of new technologies and processes. He once remarked, “What’s really important is that the money is at work, creating work.” Here, in a concise formulation, is the Mellon way. As a venture capitalist, Mellon was everywhere and nowhere. (When he arrived in Washington in 1921, he was called “the most widely unknown plutocrat in the firmament.”) Quiet in his tactics, he was every bit as aggressive as Carnegie, with none of the bluster. He was also a philanthropist, however much he disliked charity, and on a much smaller scale than Carnegie. (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is still doling it out.)

Mr. Cannadine’s account of Mellon’s art collecting—he wheeled and dealed with the canvases as much as he did as a banker, even negotiating with the Soviets in 1930 for a haul of the Hermitage’s greatest works—occasionally drags, but his sections on Mellon’s Washington years are excellent. Mellon has the unfortunate fate of being associated with three of our drabbest Presidents—Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—but he was a generally solid Secretary of the Treasury, even if he was dogged by allegations of conflict of interest. (Though required by law to divest himself of his business holdings, Mellon did keep up secret contacts via his brother.)

Ignominy came his way in the 30’s, with the so-called “tax trial.” The Roosevelt administration had the knives out for the dim gray men whom they blamed for the Depression, and they went after Mellon, now approaching 80, for tax evasion. Mr. Cannadine’s account of the proceedings is riveting. Needless to say, F.D.R. comes off looking mean, petty and vindictive; it was a nickel-and-dime affair all the way. Mellon was ultimately acquitted; too bad he was already in the grave when the verdict came down.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

The political wags tell us we’re living in a new Gilded Age, so it’s probably a good time to check in with the old—but be advised that these two biographical whoppers about a pair of industrial Andrews from the first Gilded Age aren’t for the faint of wrist. David Nasaw’s sober, methodical life of the pint-sized plutocrat (Andrew Carnegie was just a notch over five feet tall) weighs in at 878 pages; while David Cannadine’s brisker Mellon: An American Life is only a touch shorter.

That’s an awful lot of pages, but these Pittsburgh powerhouses helped define and shape an epoch of American capitalism when this country actually made things (who’s the Chinese Carnegie?), when Steel Town was true to its name—a belching, soot-covered mess otherwise known as “hell with the lid off.” Carnegie, a bumptious little Scotsman who swaggered as if he were twice his size, soared with iron and steel, smashing unions along the way—Carnegie’s tactic was to conciliate, then crush—as he piled up a vast fortune; when he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan in 1901, he walked away with $120 billion (in 2006 dollars), which he used to underwrite a hodgepodge of philanthropic causes, foundations and charitable trusts. (Next time you walk by a branch of the New York Public Library, thank Mr. Carnegie). A self-taught, self-righteous know-it-all, he lectured the world—like George Soros, he wouldn’t ever shut up—in his voluminous writings on many topics, counseled the rich to give away their money, and embarked on a quixotic campaign to bring about world peace, even if part of the Carnegie fortune came from the U.S. Navy, which bought armor plates manufactured in Carnegie mills.

The life of Andrew Mellon offers a prim study in contrast with his fellow western Pennsylvania capitalist. Whereas Carnegie was a sunny extrovert, Mellon was a shy, pallid, unfunny, emotionally stunted man who loathed the spotlight. He was no activist, nor was he, as Mr. Nasaw writes of Carnegie, a “moral philosopher of industrial capitalism.”

An entrepreneur of genius, Mellon let his endeavors speak for themselves. Mellon money helped kick-start everything from Alcoa to Gulf Oil, and flowed through almost every sector of the American economy, from banking to gas, metals and mining. A discerning, indefatigable art collector, he was the driving force in the creation of the National Gallery. In his three terms as a tax-cutting Secretary of the Treasury, he saw the 20’s roar (even if he didn’t), then crash. Unjustly vilified by F.D.R., he is today a hero of the supply side gang—Mellon was, you might say, a supply-sider avant la Laffer.

On balance, Mr. Cannadine’s volume is the more fluent of these two supremely fair and judicious books. Mr. Cannadine is chattier and more unbuttoned, while Mr. Nasaw is a dry, austere, somewhat plodding stylist. But Carnegie was the far more interesting man—and how couldn’t he be? There are more knots to untie in Carnegie than there are in 10 men. In its broad outline, the life of Andrew Carnegie is the immigrant success story writ fabulously large, and it’s got Horatio Alger beat by a mile.

Born in 1835, at 12 he arrived in Pittsburgh as a dropout, but he was a canny operator and an aggressive go-getter. From telegraph boy to superintendent on the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie gathered up a clutch of important contacts that would be instrumental in his early rise. He had instinct for infrastructure, and he built his early fortune on a welter of insider deals and secret partnerships that make one’s head spin. During and after the Civil War, the United States went railroad mad, and Carnegie was there, providing rails, wheels, steel bridges and just about everything else to keep the trains running.

Today, much of this activity would be illegal: “Carnegie survived and triumphed in an environment rife with cronyism and corruption,” Mr. Nasaw writes. Way back when, Carnegie would have been denounced as a robber baron—even now, say “Andrew Carnegie” in a union hall and you’ll probably get decked—but Mr. Nasaw is too subtle a historian to see Carnegie in such crude terms. Conversely, Mr. Nasaw doesn’t lionize him as a hero of capitalism either. (He’ll be hearing from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board about that.) Rather, Mr. Nasaw, without cheap point-scoring, carefully undercuts Carnegie’s sometimes blind estimate of his own actions: We see him as driven, perhaps deluded, an impish mass of contradictions.

By his mid-30’s, having decamped to Manhattan and sitting on a pile of loot, he resolved to give away all his money. Yet his good intentions turned him into a rather nasty capitalist; with apologies to Balzac, there may have been no great crime behind his fortune, but there were certainly a lot of ill-gotten gains. Carnegie became a man possessed, hell-bent on increasing revenues to fund his ecstatic visions. As Mr. Nasaw makes clear, part of the problem with Carnegie is that he fancied himself a disinterested sage who transcended all class and interest: Carnegie believed he could be a friend to the workingman, a selfless captain of industry and public philosopher all at once. But squaring this circle would prove nearly impossible.

If Carnegie believed the community created riches—a position he outlined in his famous “Gospel of Wealth” articles—he also believed that the community should have no role in its disposal. This awesome task would fall on the shoulders of the all-knowing retired capitalist (i.e., Carnegie) acting as a wise trustee. It was a thoroughly paternalist vision that set Carnegie on a collision course with the unions—they had no role in his scheme—and culminated in the showdown at the state-of-the-art Homestead, Penn., steelworks in 1892, one of the nastiest confrontations between capital and labor in American history. (To the men working in his plants, Carnegie effectively said: I’ll break your union, but take a library as a consolation prize.)

Carnegie’s reputation suffered terribly after the Homestead riots, yet he pressed on undeterred until his death in 1919. Mr. Nasaw’s Carnegie is a man of enormous energy—and enormous conceit. His gifts to the world—free tuition for Scottish university students; the Carnegie libraries; the famous music hall on 57th Street; research institutions; sundry endowments and bequests—were extraordinary, yet his hard-charging ways rankled many. In his campaign for world peace, which consumed his late years, he turned himself into a full-time pest, bombarding Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft with cables and letters, even telling them how to conduct their diplomacy. An infuriated T.R. fumed that “if Andrew Carnegie had employed his fortune and his time in doing justice to the steelworkers who gave him his fortune, he would have accomplished a thousand times what he has accomplished or ever can accomplish in connection with international peace.”

NO LOUD PROCLAMATIONS FROM THE AUSTERE Mellon, no running off in a thousand directions, no theoretical hobbyhorses and very few wrinkles; there’s nearly no there there. One wit said of Mellon that he looked like “a dried-up dollar bill that any wind might whisk away.” “He was a hollow man, with no interior life,” Mr. Cannadine concludes. “Mellon was a child of Mark Twain’s Gilded Age, though he disliked gilt.”

For all that, Mellon: An American Life is a surprisingly robust, even juicy look into the world of the dour Scotch-Irish G.O.P. Presbyterianism that profoundly shaped Mellon’s outlook. Mr. Cannadine gives ample space to Mellon’s stern father, “Judge” Thomas Mellon, son of a farmer and founder of T. Mellon & Sons bank, the seed of Mellon empire; Andrew’s disastrous marriage; and his strained relations with his children, Ailsa and Paul (the ever-bitter son)—all of which makes the book something of a group portrait.

Born in 1855, as a young man Mellon took the family bank and expanded and consolidated it: swallowing up other banks, seeking out alliances with the cash-hungry innovators of new technologies and processes. He once remarked, “What’s really important is that the money is at work, creating work.” Here, in a concise formulation, is the Mellon way. As a venture capitalist, Mellon was everywhere and nowhere. (When he arrived in Washington in 1921, he was called “the most widely unknown plutocrat in the firmament.”) Quiet in his tactics, he was every bit as aggressive as Carnegie, with none of the bluster. He was also a philanthropist, however much he disliked charity, and on a much smaller scale than Carnegie. (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is still doling it out.)

Mr. Cannadine’s account of Mellon’s art collecting—he wheeled and dealed with the canvases as much as he did as a banker, even negotiating with the Soviets in 1930 for a haul of the Hermitage’s greatest works—occasionally drags, but his sections on Mellon’s Washington years are excellent. Mellon has the unfortunate fate of being associated with three of our drabbest Presidents—Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—but he was a generally solid Secretary of the Treasury, even if he was dogged by allegations of conflict of interest. (Though required by law to divest himself of his business holdings, Mellon did keep up secret contacts via his brother.)

Ignominy came his way in the 30’s, with the so-called “tax trial.” The Roosevelt administration had the knives out for the dim gray men whom they blamed for the Depression, and they went after Mellon, now approaching 80, for tax evasion. Mr. Cannadine’s account of the proceedings is riveting. Needless to say, F.D.R. comes off looking mean, petty and vindictive; it was a nickel-and-dime affair all the way. Mellon was ultimately acquitted; too bad he was already in the grave when the verdict came down.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

Of course, the annals of Gilded Age lawbreaking are stocked with a good deal of half-truth, fancy and outright myth. The line between fact and folklore is often blurry, which presents obstacles to the would-be historian. Some go with the flow; they don’t get too hung up on fine distinctions. That’s how Herbert Asbury did it in his legendary chronicle The Gangs of New York (1927), and Luc Sante followed a similar tack more recently in his classic Low Life (1991)—an “exercise in naïve and personal history,” steeped in hardboiled gutter poetry, it’s on my list of the best books ever written about New York.

In A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, Timothy Gilfoyle opts for a rigorous empiricism and footnotes the heck out of things. “The actual workings of the ‘underground’ … are uncharted territory,” Mr. Gilfoyle writes, but it all depends on how you define “uncharted.” He has little time for Asbury, and I looked in vain for any reference to Low Life. As a stylist, Mr. Gilfoyle, a historian at Chicago’s Loyola University, is no match for Asbury or Mr. Sante (watch out for academic deformities like “carceral system”), but he has rolled up his sleeves, plunged into state and legal archives, and marshaled an impressive variety of sources for his methodical look at the institutions of crime and punishment in late-19th-century New York.

A Pickpocket’s Tale is ostensibly a portrait of thief and swindler George Appo. Half-Chinese, half-Irish, Appo was born in 1856. Orphaned at a young age—his father was locked up for murder in 1860, and his mother died soon after—Appo grew up on the squalid, knockabout turf of Manhattan’s Five Points, turning to pickpocketing as a boy and then to elaborate con games in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Appo frequented opium dens on lower Mott Street, where he mixed with bohemians and was a habitué of such classic dives as the Haymarket and Billy McGlory’s Armory Hall on Hester Street, which Asbury called “probably the most vicious resort New York has ever seen.” Appo even performed in an 1894 stage melodrama on the Bowery that gave him a taste of celebrity.

Though he never set foot in a classroom, Appo was a rarity for his time: a criminal who taught himself to read and write. In a rarer instance, Appo left behind a 99-page typed autobiography, which despite being “incomplete in certain parts, inarticulate in others,” Mr. Gilfoyle uses to build a broader portrait of Appo’s life and crimes. (He studs his text with generous samplings of Appo’s writing.) In the slang of his day, Appo was a “good fellow”—that is, someone who “avoided violence, employing wit and wile to make a living” (in theory, at least). As Appo himself wrote in his distinctive, offbeat style, “What constitutes a Good Fellow in the eyes and estimation of the underworld is a nervy crook, a money getter and spender.”

Short and slight, the wily Appo raked in the loot, but he also had a knack for getting into scraps that left him scarred (he was shot twice, lost an eye and stabbed in the throat) and landed him in just about every kind of lockup and jail cell the Empire State had to offer: Sing Sing, where he did three stints; the Tombs; Blackwell’s Island (better known today as Roosevelt Island); and the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

A Pickpocket’s Tale is less a sustained narrative than a series of discreet monographs organized around Appo’s criminal pursuits, hangouts and places of incarceration. Mr. Gilfoyle hurls a mind-numbing amount of facts at the reader and lapses into academic speak, which drains his material of its naturally lurid color (“Appo not only evaded the law, but also the emerging urban bourgeois norms of street behavior, domesticity, and respect for individual property”). Mr. Gilfoyle’s approach can be too dispassionate, too clinical—at times, you feel he’s holding Appo up for inspection with a pair of tweezers.

Still, we learn a lot about Appo’s haunts, the corrupt inefficiencies of the New York courts, the dynamics of the criminal economy and its crazy, often-hilarious slang. “Carbuzzers,” for example, prowled streetcars, on the lookout for a “roll” (money); aided by “stalls” (a distracting jostle), the “wire” (or “pick,” or “bugger”) then relieved the unsuspecting victims of their “leathers” (pocketbooks). A surging population, no credit cards and a cash-driven economy made Manhattan a pickpocket’s paradise, and Appo thrived for a time. But he and his brethren fell afoul of a harsh system that allowed judges to throw the book at pickpockets, who after 1870 were punished “not only with increasing severity but with more rigor than murderers.”

Appo suffered terribly at Sing Sing, where he did time on and off throughout the 1870’s. Mr. Gilfoyle’s pages on New York’s most infamous prison make for hair-raising reading. He variously compares Sing Sing to a Soviet gulag and a “haphazardly organized industrial plantation.” Prisoners were treated like animals, sold out to contractors to work menial tasks. Even worse, wardens relied on torture so savage that the minders at Guantánamo Bay would probably find it distasteful.

By the mid-1880’s, nearly broken by his time in jail, Appo switched gears: He quit pickpocketing for a more lucrative con known as the “green goods game,” an elaborate bait and switch that involved real money passed off as counterfeit. As Mr. Gilfoyle notes, the green-goods racket and similar schemes couldn’t exist without the connivance of the New York City police, who, he argues, didn’t stop crime so much as regulate it. The fix was in. Reformers wanted an end to the practice, and Appo was made to testify before the crusading Lexow Committee in 1894, which forced the resignation of several high-ranking officials. His underworld colleagues dismissed him as a rat, but Appo only confirmed what was common knowledge. A few years later, he ended up in a mental institute, and then passed in and out of a series of odd jobs. Remarkably, he lived on until 1930—his last residence, appropriately enough, was in Hell’s Kitchen.

Mr. Gilfoyle doesn’t quite know what lesson we should take from Appo’s life. Did crime pay? Maybe only a little. The author’s verdict is sobering: “In George Appo’s world David rarely beat Goliath.”

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

Of course, the annals of Gilded Age lawbreaking are stocked with a good deal of half-truth, fancy and outright myth. The line between fact and folklore is often blurry, which presents obstacles to the would-be historian. Some go with the flow; they don’t get too hung up on fine distinctions. That’s how Herbert Asbury did it in his legendary chronicle The Gangs of New York (1927), and Luc Sante followed a similar tack more recently in his classic Low Life (1991)—an “exercise in naïve and personal history,” steeped in hardboiled gutter poetry, it’s on my list of the best books ever written about New York.

In A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, Timothy Gilfoyle opts for a rigorous empiricism and footnotes the heck out of things. “The actual workings of the ‘underground’ … are uncharted territory,” Mr. Gilfoyle writes, but it all depends on how you define “uncharted.” He has little time for Asbury, and I looked in vain for any reference to Low Life. As a stylist, Mr. Gilfoyle, a historian at Chicago’s Loyola University, is no match for Asbury or Mr. Sante (watch out for academic deformities like “carceral system”), but he has rolled up his sleeves, plunged into state and legal archives, and marshaled an impressive variety of sources for his methodical look at the institutions of crime and punishment in late-19th-century New York.

A Pickpocket’s Tale is ostensibly a portrait of thief and swindler George Appo. Half-Chinese, half-Irish, Appo was born in 1856. Orphaned at a young age—his father was locked up for murder in 1860, and his mother died soon after—Appo grew up on the squalid, knockabout turf of Manhattan’s Five Points, turning to pickpocketing as a boy and then to elaborate con games in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Appo frequented opium dens on lower Mott Street, where he mixed with bohemians and was a habitué of such classic dives as the Haymarket and Billy McGlory’s Armory Hall on Hester Street, which Asbury called “probably the most vicious resort New York has ever seen.” Appo even performed in an 1894 stage melodrama on the Bowery that gave him a taste of celebrity.

Though he never set foot in a classroom, Appo was a rarity for his time: a criminal who taught himself to read and write. In a rarer instance, Appo left behind a 99-page typed autobiography, which despite being “incomplete in certain parts, inarticulate in others,” Mr. Gilfoyle uses to build a broader portrait of Appo’s life and crimes. (He studs his text with generous samplings of Appo’s writing.) In the slang of his day, Appo was a “good fellow”—that is, someone who “avoided violence, employing wit and wile to make a living” (in theory, at least). As Appo himself wrote in his distinctive, offbeat style, “What constitutes a Good Fellow in the eyes and estimation of the underworld is a nervy crook, a money getter and spender.”

Short and slight, the wily Appo raked in the loot, but he also had a knack for getting into scraps that left him scarred (he was shot twice, lost an eye and stabbed in the throat) and landed him in just about every kind of lockup and jail cell the Empire State had to offer: Sing Sing, where he did three stints; the Tombs; Blackwell’s Island (better known today as Roosevelt Island); and the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

A Pickpocket’s Tale is less a sustained narrative than a series of discreet monographs organized around Appo’s criminal pursuits, hangouts and places of incarceration. Mr. Gilfoyle hurls a mind-numbing amount of facts at the reader and lapses into academic speak, which drains his material of its naturally lurid color (“Appo not only evaded the law, but also the emerging urban bourgeois norms of street behavior, domesticity, and respect for individual property”). Mr. Gilfoyle’s approach can be too dispassionate, too clinical—at times, you feel he’s holding Appo up for inspection with a pair of tweezers.

Still, we learn a lot about Appo’s haunts, the corrupt inefficiencies of the New York courts, the dynamics of the criminal economy and its crazy, often-hilarious slang. “Carbuzzers,” for example, prowled streetcars, on the lookout for a “roll” (money); aided by “stalls” (a distracting jostle), the “wire” (or “pick,” or “bugger”) then relieved the unsuspecting victims of their “leathers” (pocketbooks). A surging population, no credit cards and a cash-driven economy made Manhattan a pickpocket’s paradise, and Appo thrived for a time. But he and his brethren fell afoul of a harsh system that allowed judges to throw the book at pickpockets, who after 1870 were punished “not only with increasing severity but with more rigor than murderers.”

Appo suffered terribly at Sing Sing, where he did time on and off throughout the 1870’s. Mr. Gilfoyle’s pages on New York’s most infamous prison make for hair-raising reading. He variously compares Sing Sing to a Soviet gulag and a “haphazardly organized industrial plantation.” Prisoners were treated like animals, sold out to contractors to work menial tasks. Even worse, wardens relied on torture so savage that the minders at Guantánamo Bay would probably find it distasteful.

By the mid-1880’s, nearly broken by his time in jail, Appo switched gears: He quit pickpocketing for a more lucrative con known as the “green goods game,” an elaborate bait and switch that involved real money passed off as counterfeit. As Mr. Gilfoyle notes, the green-goods racket and similar schemes couldn’t exist without the connivance of the New York City police, who, he argues, didn’t stop crime so much as regulate it. The fix was in. Reformers wanted an end to the practice, and Appo was made to testify before the crusading Lexow Committee in 1894, which forced the resignation of several high-ranking officials. His underworld colleagues dismissed him as a rat, but Appo only confirmed what was common knowledge. A few years later, he ended up in a mental institute, and then passed in and out of a series of odd jobs. Remarkably, he lived on until 1930—his last residence, appropriately enough, was in Hell’s Kitchen.

Mr. Gilfoyle doesn’t quite know what lesson we should take from Appo’s life. Did crime pay? Maybe only a little. The author’s verdict is sobering: “In George Appo’s world David rarely beat Goliath.”

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

Of course, Eastern disdain for Southern California is a fine old tradition—which is kind of funny, since so many Easterners (and plenty of New Yorkers) live there. As Amy Wilentz reminds us several times in I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen, a winding memoir doing double duty as a travelogue and sociopolitical study, she’s just a Jersey girl (Perth Amboy) and former resident of the Upper West Side trying to figure out the Southland thing. When her husband took a job at the Los Angeles Times in 2003, Ms. Wilentz, an accomplished journalist and former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, packed up and touched down in “a gas-guzzling consumathon with hundreds of thousands of miles of asphalt but barely any public transportation.”

Which isn’t to say that Ms. Wilentz flat-out dislikes Los Angeles—throughout, she carefully monitors her ambivalence and settles for a heavily qualified “O.K.” As she playfully notes, such is the lot of many New Yorkers who both love and loathe the same things: cars, blondes, pools, sunshine—the whole SoCal shebang. Still, she catalogs all the greatest hits from the Southern-California-as-apocalypse play list: the threat of earthquakes, subdivisions besieged by brushfires, way too many people and not nearly enough water—that is, until it rains, which brings mudslides and wrecked houses. You know the drill.

As all this is happening, Ms. Wilentz also tries to get her head around the political earthquake otherwise known as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who swept to victory in a Republican-led recall of Democrat Gray Davis in 2003. Ms. Wilentz states her liberal bona fides, but she has a soft spot for the Governator, even if she can’t quite explain why. She more or less gives him a pass on his alleged bad behavior and sexual indiscretions. Her intellect tells her he’s a bad thing, but, refreshingly, she doesn’t dismiss him—or the carnivalesque recall, which had most Democrats frothing at the mouth. She concludes that there’s a certain kooky logic to the rise of Governor Schwarzenegger: He’s a huckster, a glad-hander, a salesman, a cad, an affable lunkhead, yet he somehow makes sense. After all, like many Californians, Mr. Schwarzenegger is a “self-invented figure,” she notes, and hardly the first movie star to get himself elected to California office: There’s Clint and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Mr. Schwarzenegger is a pure narcissist, but that makes him even more of a force in the political arena. (Despite a few bungles—like taking on the state’s nurses—the chances are decent that he’ll win another term this fall.) What can she say? Ms. Wilentz digs his vibe.

Still, she never gets too cozy in her new environs. For a reporter who’s done time in some tough places—Haiti, for her first book, The Rainy Season (1989), and then the Middle East, about which she wrote a novel, Martyrs’ Crossing (2001)—Ms. Wilentz is spooked by SoCal. (“I had arrived in LA hoping to avoid catastrophe, only to find that I was living in its capital.”) Back in the 60’s, Joan Didion practically invented the genre of California unease; some 40 years on, there’s still much to be uneasy about. But Ms. Wilentz’s opening set piece, a visit to California City, which is little more than a white elephant in the Mojave Desert, is something of a cheap shot. As Gertrude Stein once said of another California city (Oakland, to be exact), there’s no there there. It’s a failed Levittown, “urban development in the wild,” the product of a bogus vision, which, Ms. Wilentz implies, perhaps helps to explain California itself.

Ms. Wilentz takes other jaunts—up north to Big Sur, where she pokes around a New Age retreat, to the agricultural hub of Central Valley, and to the surreal landscapes of the Salton Sea. If these trips prompt some interesting observations, I found her sections on Los Angeles, which take up a good portion of the book, disappointing and familiar. She stays mostly confined to a narrow band of the Angeleno elite: She trades notes with Arianna Huffington, who also ran for governor, and talks politics with Warren Beatty over lunch, an encounter that yields little more than tepid celebrity journalism.

Ms. Wilentz hobnobs with Stewart and Lynda Resnick, an Eastern-born, liberal power couple who’ve made it big out west. (They have extensive agribusiness holdings and are co-owners of the Franklin Mint, tchotchke manufacturers extraordinaire.) For Ms. Wilentz, the Resnicks are exemplars of a particular kind of spectacularly vulgar L.A. nouveau riche success. And they, in turn, don’t know quite what to make of Ms. Wilentz: “To them, I’m a strange alien observer, at best.” Recalling these encounters—Mr. Resnick once mistakes her for his “industrial psychologist”—she does what any New Yorker might do and retreats into a self-deprecating shtick that, at times, shades into bizarre self-pity.

When she gets away from this crowd, her account sharpens. Her trip to Lakewood, a 1950’s suburban tract-housing community, tells one a lot about where that much-remarked-upon sprawl came from, and why, for better or worse, it’s offered a version of middle-class paradise. Ms. Wilentz’s prose never quite cuts to the bone, but her brief meditation on Lakewood has both sting and pathos. Contrasting it to her own New Jersey town, she jibes that “we were not made full-blown and then sold all at once.” Lakewood, she allows, “is a place that admits what it is, that longs for nothing more, that lives up to small, reachable expectations.” There’s a great deal of wisdom in those lines.

But I wish Ms. Wilentz had more to say about Los Angeles’ urban ecology, which I find completely fascinating. About the built environment, she offers up the trite remark that L.A.’s architecture is “relatively inauthentic”—which misses the point. For all its problems—its patches of blight, its traffic jams, its infamous Skid Row and about half a dozen other social ills—Los Angeles is actually an extraordinarily beautiful place, with a wonderful jumble of housing styles and neighborhoods. And the best way to see this Los Angeles isn’t necessarily by car. Here’s a tip. It may not always be practical, and you’ll certainly get some strange looks, but next time you visit, tackle L.A. New York–style: by bus, by subway (it exists) and, yes, even by foot.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

Of course, Eastern disdain for Southern California is a fine old tradition—which is kind of funny, since so many Easterners (and plenty of New Yorkers) live there. As Amy Wilentz reminds us several times in I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen, a winding memoir doing double duty as a travelogue and sociopolitical study, she’s just a Jersey girl (Perth Amboy) and former resident of the Upper West Side trying to figure out the Southland thing. When her husband took a job at the Los Angeles Times in 2003, Ms. Wilentz, an accomplished journalist and former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, packed up and touched down in “a gas-guzzling consumathon with hundreds of thousands of miles of asphalt but barely any public transportation.”

Which isn’t to say that Ms. Wilentz flat-out dislikes Los Angeles—throughout, she carefully monitors her ambivalence and settles for a heavily qualified “O.K.” As she playfully notes, such is the lot of many New Yorkers who both love and loathe the same things: cars, blondes, pools, sunshine—the whole SoCal shebang. Still, she catalogs all the greatest hits from the Southern-California-as-apocalypse play list: the threat of earthquakes, subdivisions besieged by brushfires, way too many people and not nearly enough water—that is, until it rains, which brings mudslides and wrecked houses. You know the drill.

As all this is happening, Ms. Wilentz also tries to get her head around the political earthquake otherwise known as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who swept to victory in a Republican-led recall of Democrat Gray Davis in 2003. Ms. Wilentz states her liberal bona fides, but she has a soft spot for the Governator, even if she can’t quite explain why. She more or less gives him a pass on his alleged bad behavior and sexual indiscretions. Her intellect tells her he’s a bad thing, but, refreshingly, she doesn’t dismiss him—or the carnivalesque recall, which had most Democrats frothing at the mouth. She concludes that there’s a certain kooky logic to the rise of Governor Schwarzenegger: He’s a huckster, a glad-hander, a salesman, a cad, an affable lunkhead, yet he somehow makes sense. After all, like many Californians, Mr. Schwarzenegger is a “self-invented figure,” she notes, and hardly the first movie star to get himself elected to California office: There’s Clint and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Mr. Schwarzenegger is a pure narcissist, but that makes him even more of a force in the political arena. (Despite a few bungles—like taking on the state’s nurses—the chances are decent that he’ll win another term this fall.) What can she say? Ms. Wilentz digs his vibe.

Still, she never gets too cozy in her new environs. For a reporter who’s done time in some tough places—Haiti, for her first book, The Rainy Season (1989), and then the Middle East, about which she wrote a novel, Martyrs’ Crossing (2001)—Ms. Wilentz is spooked by SoCal. (“I had arrived in LA hoping to avoid catastrophe, only to find that I was living in its capital.”) Back in the 60’s, Joan Didion practically invented the genre of California unease; some 40 years on, there’s still much to be uneasy about. But Ms. Wilentz’s opening set piece, a visit to California City, which is little more than a white elephant in the Mojave Desert, is something of a cheap shot. As Gertrude Stein once said of another California city (Oakland, to be exact), there’s no there there. It’s a failed Levittown, “urban development in the wild,” the product of a bogus vision, which, Ms. Wilentz implies, perhaps helps to explain California itself.

Ms. Wilentz takes other jaunts—up north to Big Sur, where she pokes around a New Age retreat, to the agricultural hub of Central Valley, and to the surreal landscapes of the Salton Sea. If these trips prompt some interesting observations, I found her sections on Los Angeles, which take up a good portion of the book, disappointing and familiar. She stays mostly confined to a narrow band of the Angeleno elite: She trades notes with Arianna Huffington, who also ran for governor, and talks politics with Warren Beatty over lunch, an encounter that yields little more than tepid celebrity journalism.

Ms. Wilentz hobnobs with Stewart and Lynda Resnick, an Eastern-born, liberal power couple who’ve made it big out west. (They have extensive agribusiness holdings and are co-owners of the Franklin Mint, tchotchke manufacturers extraordinaire.) For Ms. Wilentz, the Resnicks are exemplars of a particular kind of spectacularly vulgar L.A. nouveau riche success. And they, in turn, don’t know quite what to make of Ms. Wilentz: “To them, I’m a strange alien observer, at best.” Recalling these encounters—Mr. Resnick once mistakes her for his “industrial psychologist”—she does what any New Yorker might do and retreats into a self-deprecating shtick that, at times, shades into bizarre self-pity.

When she gets away from this crowd, her account sharpens. Her trip to Lakewood, a 1950’s suburban tract-housing community, tells one a lot about where that much-remarked-upon sprawl came from, and why, for better or worse, it’s offered a version of middle-class paradise. Ms. Wilentz’s prose never quite cuts to the bone, but her brief meditation on Lakewood has both sting and pathos. Contrasting it to her own New Jersey town, she jibes that “we were not made full-blown and then sold all at once.” Lakewood, she allows, “is a place that admits what it is, that longs for nothing more, that lives up to small, reachable expectations.” There’s a great deal of wisdom in those lines.

But I wish Ms. Wilentz had more to say about Los Angeles’ urban ecology, which I find completely fascinating. About the built environment, she offers up the trite remark that L.A.’s architecture is “relatively inauthentic”—which misses the point. For all its problems—its patches of blight, its traffic jams, its infamous Skid Row and about half a dozen other social ills—Los Angeles is actually an extraordinarily beautiful place, with a wonderful jumble of housing styles and neighborhoods. And the best way to see this Los Angeles isn’t necessarily by car. Here’s a tip. It may not always be practical, and you’ll certainly get some strange looks, but next time you visit, tackle L.A. New York–style: by bus, by subway (it exists) and, yes, even by foot.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.