Overview

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 Westa city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.

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9781786635891

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Absolutely fascinating. - William Gibson 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. - San Francisco Examiner A history as fascinating as it is instructive. - Peter Ackroyd, Times As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies. - Dana Goodyear, New Yorker Angelenos, now is the time to lean into Mike Davis's apocalyptic, passionate, radical rants on the sprawling, gorgeous mess that is Los Angeles. - Stephanie Danler, author of Stray and Sweetbitter

Absolutely fascinating. - William Gibson 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. - San Francisco Examiner A history as fascinating as it is instructive. - Peter Ackroyd, Times As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies. - Dana Goodyear, New Yorker

Absolutely fascinating. - William Gibson 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. - San Francisco Examiner A history as fascinating as it is instructive. - Peter Ackroyd, Times

Author Information

Mike Davis was a meat cutter and truck driver, as well as an activist for Students for a Democratic Society before starting his academic career. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. His many books on history and the city, including the bestselling City of Quartz, have been critically acclaimed across the world.

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