Description

By (author) Davis Mike

Short /annotation:
In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA”s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy.

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No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA”s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West – a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.

Review quote:
Absolutely fascinating.

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Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future.

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A history as fascinating as it is instructive.

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As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies.

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Angelenos, now is the time to lean into Mike Davis”s apocalyptic, passionate, radical rants on the sprawling, gorgeous mess that is Los Angeles.

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City of Quartz deserves to be emancipated from its parochial legacy…[It is] a working theory of global cities writ large, with as much to teach us about multiculturalism as it does racial apartheid in Los Angeles.

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A wildly original analysis of the city on the threshold of the new millennium, the book synthesized knowledge about Los Angeles”s history, politics, culture, architecture, policing, immigration, and more, painting a dark picture that embodied a kind of American urban dystopia on steroids after the nightmare of Reaganism and the “developers” millennium.”

Review quote:
Dazzling

Biographical note:

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.

Promotional headline:
A new edition of Mike Davis”s visionary work on Los Angeles and the transformation of the modern city.

Feature:
Bestselling book on the changing shape of the modern city by legendary historian and urbanist Mike Davis.

Feature:
Part of the Mike Davis Classics series.