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City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles | 
 enlarge | Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 100801
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0679738061
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.0979494
EAN: 9780679738060
ASIN: 0679738061
Publication Date: March 10, 1992
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Amazon.com Review
Mike Davis peers into a looking glass to divine the future of Los Angeles, and what he sees is not encouraging: a city--or better, a concatenation of competing city states--torn by racial enmity, economic disparity, and social anomie. Looking backward, Davis suggests that Los Angeles has always been contested ground. In the 1840s, he writes, a combination of drought and industrial stock raising led to the destruction of small-scale Spanish farming in the region. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was the scene of a bitter conflict between management and industrial workers, so bitter that the publisher of the Los Angeles Times retreated to a heavily fortified home he called "The Bivouac." And in 1992, much of the city fell before flames and riot in a scenario Davis describes as thus: "Gangs are multiplying at a terrifying rate, cops are becoming more arrogant and trigger-happy, and a whole generation is being shunted toward some impossible Armageddon." Davis's voice-in-a-whirlwind approach to the past, present, and future of Los Angeles is alarming and arresting, and his book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary affairs. --Gregory MacNamee
Product Description
A work of social criticism shows how Los Angeles's history, hidden power structure, and disparity of wealth will effect the city's future and the future of urban America in general. Reprint.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 Rotten World March 7, 2008
Davis deserves praise as the voice of doom, articulated poetically, like a Biblical prophet. The ideology may be old hat, but the tone is refreshing. It takes bravery to be pessimistic in this day and age. I found the book breathtakingly persuasive as an indictment of the corrupt and corrupting power of LA's grand founding fathers whose names mark every city map. How ironic that we honor such thuggish greed, thoughtlessly. As noted by others, the final chapter on Fontana is very well done, beautifully written and passionately narrated. One might object to Davis's seemingly tiresome "politics" but this suggests that the same story could be told from a so-called "objective" point of view. This is absurd. The story is politics and there is no neutral position. But I think what stands out is Davis' love of the land and his partisan loyalty to the city itself. If he is a Marxist, he is no disloyal leftist claiming world citizenship. To the contrary, Davis falls right in with the best of the great American patriotic progressives, fighting for justice. "City of Quartz" is a love letter to a great city.
The Cassandra of Post-Liberal America at his best October 24, 2006
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book is an outstanding synthesis of architectural and urban studies, political and intellectual history, and good-old marxist polemics. The major lesson to draw from this book is that LIBERALISM IN AMERICA IS OVER. This is exemplified most profoundly in the chapter entitled "The Hammer and The Rock," where Davis makes the case that the LAPD's wars on drugs, gangs, and other things a racist might associate with inner-city youth amount to a neo-colonial occupation of poor (mostly colored) LA. This chapter is also widely credited with anticipating the 1992 uprisings.
As to the complaints others have lodged against Davis fact-checking and his general tone: these charges are at best specious and at worst libel. First of all, the book is impeccably documented and annotated, having been originally published by a reputable academic publisher (Verso). Second, his general point of political orientation and critique is unapologetically leftist. Not leftist as most American's (mis)understand the term --- i.e. hopelessly naive, pacificist, "tolerant," and so on --- but leftist in the venerable tradition of Marx and Engels, where it is assumed that there is ultimately no war but class war and never too much to know about the problems with ruling class methods of exploitation under capitalism. This means that Davis compensates for the paucity of justice in the world by injecting his rhetoric with equal helpings of sarcasm, irony, and, above all, humanity.
If you prefer books that find the Aristotelian "happy medium" between competing perspectives, this is not a book for you. If, on the other hand, you want to read a prophetic work of history that exemplifies what the application of good scholarship can be, this is your book.
 The Dystopian Utopia October 7, 2006
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a sociopolitical analysis of the dark side of the supposed Los Angeles promised land. It's often quite interesting in itself, though it meanders into academic obtuseness, sanctimonious sour grapes, and a lack of validity to the rest of the world. Mike Davis is a fine muckraker as he uncovers the unique and often bizarre cultural-economic-sociological-political structures of L.A. This applies especially to the sickening power of the real estate and development industries, and the forced and hyperbolic local obsession with maintaining upper-middle class lifestyles at the expense of the most horrific and downtrodden ghettos imaginable. This book nearly achieves victory with chapters 4 and 5 - two powerful manifestos, respectively, on the class separation quietly implemented by architects and planners, and the violent oppression of the lower classes by a hubristic law enforcement complex.
Unfortunately, the book fails as a whole due to the typical weaknesses of academic writing. The separate chapters probably originated as distinct research projects that are only categorically associated with the main thesis, and the reader may wonder why each passing subject belongs in the book. This applies most to the chapter on the L.A. Catholic Archdiocese, which is of especially dubious usefulness. Meanwhile, Davis is a classic detached academic who thinks he's writing a book for the masses, but can't stop trying to impress a few other professors. Thus we have the standard long-winded and obtuse professorial writing style, complete with continuous namedropping of other obscure intellectuals, vast postmodernist statements about vague connections between disparate social phenomena, and turning the names of social thinkers into adjectives (with the recurring suffix "-ian") to describe passing concepts. Davis also can't stop making up his own terms for one-time use in impressing academia, like "squirearchy," "cryogenized," or "monolithicity." And just try to digest the following statement from a discussion about the history of the L.A. jazz scene - "...seeking through introspection and experiment to fashion a hegemonic alternative to the deracination..." Perhaps Davis has managed to impress his colleagues with all this useless gobbledygook, but he has failed with the interested reader. And any audience will be ultimately disappointed with how Davis merely complains about all of L.A.'s problems without offering any (even high-level) solutions, while also forgetting to explore how any of this analysis can be applied to other cities or environments with similar problems. [~doomsdayer520~]
 Factually lacking October 31, 2005
11 out of 41 found this review helpful
Mike Davis, in an interview, admitted that he does not let the facts stand in the way of his arguments. City of Quartz demonstrates this tendency to the fullest. In a previous work, Davis pulled a passage out of a work of fiction and cited it as fact. He shows similar inventiveness in this work, citing studies that were never conducted, inventing interviews, and displaying a creativity with statistics that would be admirable if it weren't for the frightening fact that many who have read this work found it "incisive."
Those who applaud this work do so because it supports their politics. Those who attack it do so because it does not. I tried to remain neutral while reading, but when I read the book I found the inaccuracies to completely outweigh any points made by Davis. His purposeful and methodical deception does more harm than good to his cause.
For more information on this work, see an article at:
(...)
I would steer clear of Mike Davis and his blatant distortions of the truth.
Not a book to be quickly written off April 28, 2005
23 out of 26 found this review helpful
I'd just like to offer a voice of temperance after reading a number of the reviews here. The boogeyman mentions of Davis' "Marxist" leanings are worthy of the McCarthy hearings. The mock citations of the type "All the other books I read in the field are much better" are proof of the reviewers' pretentiousness rather than a comment on the value of Davis' book. And, the ad hominem attacks against Davis are unfortunate and probably fueled by the envy of the young and non-published towards Davis as a productive scholar who doesn't seem like he's going away anytime soon. All of which is to say, forget the negative reviews and give City of Quartz a read. It was an insightful, even shocking, book when I read it years ago and continues to make for a solid supplement to a lived experience and a wide-range of contrasting readings on L.A. (as well as a good antidote against the boosterism and dreamy-eyed tripe that often goes around about our city).
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