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Title: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis ISBN: 0-679-73806-1 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.41 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Tough Love
Comment: This is an essential and brilliant book. Davis tells stories and expresses thoughts with an energy and incisiveness that's I've never seen matched in this kind of criticism, intelligent and though-out enough to run the risk or being dry, but presented with such passion and skill that it's never an issue. Other reviewers have addressed Davis's actual topics, but there seems to be a sense that this is a handbook for hating LA. I live in LA, and I love LA, even if it is despite itself. I suspect Davis feels the same way. This book isn't just LA-bashing; it's truth-telling, and the kind that seems to me to be the product of a kind of obsessive (if slightly damaged) love for the city. And it's an essential book precisely because LA is such an essential and defining American city.
Rating: 5
Summary: best book on the postmodern city i've read
Comment: Mike Davis excavates the history of the future as lived and dreamed in Los Angeles. Davis is a gifted writer, and a gifted intellect. But, he doen't let his intellect blind him to the social complexities of life in the new urban spaces. While other contemporary intellectuals are busy flattering themselves or those they would identify with, the upwardly mobile, Davis offers a completely other possibility for culture and the intellect; his intellect is not window dressing nor the mark of some ersatz high culture crudely associated with money and class, his gift is work, hard work. You know how much hard work he has put into trying to understand and excavate his beloved, no less beloved for being so ugly, Los Angeles, from the first sentence of the book. And his work is a gift to the rest of us, that we may begin to humanize our cities again. We may, if we realize just what a hell we have created for ourselves and how it could be different. The story of how the postmodern city came to be is not written in stone nor was it ever predetermined; it is idiosyncratic and contingent and vulnerable to change in the future.
The fine crafting of the sentences, the tremendous intellectual dexterity, and the insights into just what it is we are living are the product of hard work. This writer is a laborer, one whose work inspires hope even as he uncovers a truth that many would forever bury: We are at war against the poor and not only do we not care, we don't even notice. Why? Read this book.
Rating: 1
Summary: Forgettable
Comment: As a student of urban development and politics, I can confidently say that this book is a forgettable work of a parochial mind. Davis offers a hardline Marxist view of Los Angeles that, by employing simply economic analysis, does not allow for the intricacies of the city's problems. Class warfare plays a much smaller role in the sprawl of Los Angeles -- anyone outside of the ISO should be discouraged from reading this baseless drivel.
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Title: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis ISBN: 0375706070 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by Reyner Banham ISBN: 0520219244 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 02 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Dead Cities: And Other Tales by Mike Davis ISBN: 1565848446 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams ISBN: 0879050071 Publisher: Peregrine Smith Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson ISBN: 0195049837 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1987 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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