City of Quartz Audiobook By Mike Davis cover art

City of Quartz

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

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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. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city's current status.

©1990 Verso; Preface 2006 by Mike Davis (P)2018 Tantor Politics & Government State & Local Social Sciences United States Americas Sociology Capitalism Criminology Public Policy Socialism Liberalism Crime
Thorough Research • Insightful Perspective • Enjoyable Reader Voice • Valuable Historical Data • Transformational Insight

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needs to be updated and bridged to 2021. good history but not end of story

good not great

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A fascinating cautionary history of So Cal. land ownership & business. Famous families, secrets, why things failed, or succeeded, who’s who today & how they got there.
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Winston Churchill / George Santayana

A fascinating history of So Cal. land ownership & business.

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LA is presented as not a given, but as social relations made, unmade and remade in historical time, choices made by individual and group actors yes, but under conditions they ultimately didn't choose.

The metaphor of noir ties in nicely with the felt inexorability of political, social, and geographical upheavals and conflicts given the broader context of forces and relations in motion. Yet, despite this, Davis gives a sense of rebellion even in its most cynical and nihilistic forms as a creative as well as creatively destructive force. The contending classes may end in ruin but not without a fight.

Carefully elaborates LA in historical character

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the narrator speaks too fast for my taste. hard to digest all the info at that speed. other than that, a lot of interesting information about LA

good political history of LA

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Interesting, leftist urban history of Los Angeles. At times feels hyperbolic and sensationalized (ex comparing widespread joblessness to literal nuclear disaster) and this is exacerbated by the reader’s dramatic voice, which is reminiscent of the Preview Man. Nonetheless some really educational and revelatory reporting on the power levers operating in LA’s geography including global finance and local politics. Written in 1990, sections on the drug wars, urban development and Latin American asylum seekers directly foreshadow current major political issues.

Interesting LA history

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