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|  | |  | | | City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition) | | | | | SKU:
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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | This new edition of Mike Davis’s visionary work gives an update on Los Angeles as the city hits the 21st century. 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. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city's current status. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Mike Davis | | Paperback: | 441 pages | | Publisher: | Verso | | Publication Date: | September 04, 2006 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1844675688 | | Product Width: | 155.5 centimeters | | Product Height: | 204.0 centimeters | | Product Weight: | 1.07 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.19 inches | | Package Width: | 5.43 inches | | Package Height: | 1.57 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.06 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 13 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 13 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 36 found the following review helpful:
 Radical history of Los Angeles Feb 25, 2007
By M. A. Krul
Davis is well-known in radical circles as a popular writer on various issues relating to labor movements and the like. This is essentially a history of the city of Los Angeles and its surroundings from a radical perspective. It's quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything. He also has the tendency to call historical incidences of repression a "holocaust" (he actually uses this word multiple times for different things), which I don't like being used in this manner. Aside from that though, it's a welcome different approach from the usual hagiographic or hip postmodern analyses of conglomeration cities like LA. There's not much more I can say about it, as whether you like his left-wing critical vignettes or not will be mostly a matter of taste - judge it for yourself.
11 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 city of quartz , new edition Sep 19, 2007
By Dr. Donald Cramer
"newsjunkie"
City of Quartz, the original version, is an excellent book on the history of Los Angeles until 1989, well readable, informative and incisive, a must-read even if some people take offense at views which are neither mainstream nor conservative.
When you finish the book you are very curious as to how that author would write about the years since 1989.
That book still needs to be written.
But in an extensive foreword to this new edition many aspects of the most recent history of the most fascinating metropolis on the planet are touched, the Watts riots and whatnot; obviously there is much more and whoever follows what Davis writes in journals about Katrina-torn New Orleans and other hot topics, google his books !, can't wait until a new, extensively updated "City of Quartz" will be out.
 Maybe not the best place to start if you've never been to L.A. or California for that matter Mar 05, 2012
By jafrank
I found this really difficult to get through. While Davis's approach is very wide ranging and comprehensive, I often found myself struggling to keep up with all of the historical examples and various people mentioned in this account. Having never been there myself and knowing next to nothing about the area's history, I often felt myself overwhelmed, struggling to keep track of the various people and institutions that helped shape such a fractured, peculiarly American locale. I think it would have helped if I'd read a more general history of the region first before diving into something this intricately informed about its subject
5 of 8 found the following review helpful:
A provocative (but over-reaching) essay on urban inequality Dec 23, 2008
By J. C. Dixon
"Chris"
Several years ago I picked this book up on a business trip to L.A. and couldn't put it down. Since then I've become an armchair aficionado of L.A./Southland history and returned to explore the area as often as I can afford. This book has to be compared to the likes of Heidi and Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" and so forth. It's part essay, part history, and part futurism. As with the "Third Wave" it's full of breathless pronouncements of WHAT HAS BEEN and WHAT WILL BE--except this is more of a dystopian nightmare. Like it or not, L.A. has been the most important city in America--probably the world--since World War Two. This comes thanks to the advent of TV, which sold the world on "fun in the sun." So, if you want to read one grand pronouncement on the darkest possible outcome of modern urban inequality, this is a good one. Just figure it won't turn out as badly as he predicts. Mike Davis is like a stopped clock of the analog variety. He's going to be right twice a day. But it sure is fun to read him going on about it.
10 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 Wretched unreadable writing but interesting info and arguments Jun 09, 2011
By Mark_the_Maven
A mix of good and bad. Good: exhaustively researched, full of references, some of which I intend to read. A good starting point for many topics. I found his chapter on the history of Fontana fascinating. I also enjoyed the explanation of L.A.'s power elite and its development.
Bad: obsessive, and I mean OBSESSIVE, leftist bias. E.g., the Watts riots are the "Watts rebellion." E.g., his constant, grating mockery of the home ownership dreams of working class white people. E.g., Maxine Waters is a "respected legislator." Actually she's the epitome of the bigoted, shrill, corrupt black politician. E.g., "so-called blighted" areas or "purported high crime areas" the author cites are in fact, not just in his sarcasm, in many cases blighted and high crime and wracked by drugs (e.g., Pico-Union District). Visit it if you don't believe me. Teenagers will rush your car to offer you crack cocaine, fake green cards and underage Salvadoran girls.
Bad: The writing style is wretched. When an author has severe problems, don't publishers provide editors anymore? The author delights in using giant words where small ones would do. Even the well-educated reader needs a dictionary, preferably a huge one, at hand. He also is in love with giant sentences and enormous paragraphs. Junior high English teacher to Davis: short sentences! paragraph breaks!
The writing style is so poor that what could be a brisk, lively read (discounting the author's bias, of course) is not. I ran a sample through readability indexes like the Gunning Fog Index and the Flesch Index and it was off the charts. It is probably unreadable for a high school grad, very tough going for a bright college student, and an agonizing slog, thick as treacle, "dry as sawdust without butter" even for someone with a graduate school education and years of professional writing. (Like myself.) What a shame. Even a mechanical clean-up with smaller words, shorter sentences and four times the paragraph breaks would have transformed this book.
The small number of photos are excellent but very poorly reproduced. More photos, sharply printed, would have been worth thousands of words.
See all 13 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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