Columnist Frank
Gruber is the voice of a new breed of citizen cropping up in cities
and towns across America – the urban worrier.
While most people
who pay attention to the news know more about the latest developments
on the national and international fronts than about what goes on in
their own cities and towns, Gruber has a passion for what’s taking
place in his own backyard -- Santa Monica, California.
Urban Worrier:
Making Politics Personal is a selection of the insightful, opinionated,
and entertaining weekly columns he has written for the Lookout News,
one of the nation’s oldest local internet news sites, will soon
be available in bookstores.
A lawyer and former
planning commissioner, Gruber is a born storyteller, one who can make
the placement of a traffic light or the battle over the height of a
hedge a compelling read.
“His writing
can make the intricacies of a bureaucrat’s zoning decision sound
like it really can have a lasting effect on our lives,” Jorge
Casuso, publisher and editor of the Lookout News, writes in the preface
of Urban Worrier.
Richard A. Walker,
Chair of the California Studies Center at the University of California,
Berkeley, writes: “My town of Berkeley could well use such a clear
and sympathetic liberal voice as Frank Gruber’s—as could
a hundred other California cities—to coach us on the vexing matters
of the everyday.”
While Gruber focuses
on the goings on in Santa Monica—a playground for the rich and
famous that is also the arena for a highly political populace—he
is by no means unaffected by the world at large.
In addition to
tackling urban issues such as development, traffic, homelessness, and
education, and writing about tragedies in life that can strike anywhere,
Urban Worrier includes Gruber’s takes on 9/11, the war in Iraq,
and presidential politics, as well as vacations in a village in Italy.
How to cook with anchovies and cannellini beans are also subjects he
writes about.
Urban Worrier—a
selection of columns that ran from 2000 to 2004—provides an inside
look at life and politics in one American town at the turn of the 21st
Century. City Image Press has set its publication date for June 1, 2009.
To read Frank Gruber’s
weekly column “What I Say, visit the Lookout News at http://www.surfsantamonica.com.
