Los Angeles magazine's September issue includes a round-up of the area's best high schools (not on line) and a book review-cum-profile of the city's most visible activist parent of the moment — author-performer Sandra Tsing Loh. Ariel Swartley writes, "For 20 years Sandra Tsing Loh has taken satirical shots at Los Angeles and her own growing pains without making the tiresome error, committed by nonnative observers from Joan Didion to Caitlin Flanagan, of conflating the two. Her aim is generally dead-on; her gun emplacement is even better." She continues:

We not only can read the Malibu-raised Loh in The Atlantic Monthly, where she’s a contributing editor, on her Los Angeles Times blog, and in comic memoirs like "A Year in Van Nuys." We can also hear her on KPCC and see her turn her elegant Chinese German face to Silly Putty in performance pieces.

Whatever the target—eye bags, ethnicity, envy, Christmas—Loh’s a linguistic Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging at a pace that would drive a hummingbird to wing splints. At times her approach has left some of her frailer subjects exhausted along with her audience. With "Mother on Fire" (Crown, 320 pages, $23), her new memoir expanding on the one-woman show of the same name that debuted in 2005, she’s taken on an issue scary enough to warrant her biggest guns: getting your child an education.

Loh's book discusses her controversial dismissal from the KCRW commentator lineup in 2004 over an errant f-word.

Also in the September issue: a story by Ben Ehrenreich about the death of an immigrant detainee at Terminal Island, a look at the Chicano art at LACMA, and Editor Kit Rachlis admits to loving granola. On the mag blogs, Brad Korzen tells Laurie Pike that an Abu Dhabi company has bought a 50% stake in his Kor Hotel Group.

Cropped photo of Loh: Beth Coller