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This section details the increasing LAs resources Downtown. Throughout the novel, the author depicts his home as a historical city filled with the dead and their vast cemeteries and stories, yet at the same time a flesh city, ruled by dreams, masques, and shifting identities (66, 133). Of enacting a grand plan of city building. Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. In fact, when the L.A. riots broke out in 1992, Davis appeared redeemed, the darkest corners of his thesis tragically validated. And even if Davis theory was plenty frayed along the edges, his (paradoxical) pessimistic enthusiasm for it -- the sheer fevered drama of his Cassandra-like warnings -- made it fresh and remarkably appealing. Namely, all it represents: the excess, the sprawl, the city as actor, and an ever looming fear of a elemental breakdown (be that abstract, or an earthquake). In this controversial tour de force of scholarship, unsparing vision, and inspired writing, Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz, revisits Los Angeles as a Book of the Apocalypse theme park. anti-graffiti barricades . City of Quartz Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary Rather, his intentions are clear in the title of the book: to show the power of boundless compassion he experienced and displayed. Some factual inconsistencies have come to light and Davis' other work (I've read it all) doesn't do much for me at all, but this book is amazing. For three days, I trod the . As a native of Los Angeles, I really enjoyed reading this great history on that city - which I have always had an intense love/hate relationship with. San Fernando Valley was to be the first battlefield for old landscape versus new development. Rereading it now, nearly three decades later, I feel more convinced than ever that this prediction will be fulfilled. A lot of the chapters by the end just seemed like random subjects, all of which I guess were central ideas pertaining to the city-- the Catholic church, a steel town called Fontana, some other stuff. During a term in jail, Cle Sloan read the book City of Quartz by Mike Davis and found his neighborhood of Athens Park on a map depicting LAPD gang hot spots of 1972. He was 76. redevelopment project of corporate offices, hotels and shopping malls. One could construe this as a form of 'getting there'. One where the post industrial decay has taken hold, and the dream, both of the establishment and the working class, has long since dried up, leaving a rusty pile of girders and rotting houses. I knew next to nothing about Los Angeles until I dove into this treasure trove of information revealing the shaddy history and bleak future of the City of Quartz. Davis then explores intellectuals' competing ideas of Los Angeles, from the "sunshine" promoted by real estate boosters early in the 20th century, to the "debunkers," the muckraking journalists of the early century, to the "noir" writers of the 1930s and the exiles fleeing from fascism in Europe, and finally the "sorcerers," the scientists at Caltech. Mike Davis is a mental giant. Mike Davis was the author of City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, Buda's Wagon, Planet of Slums, Old Gods, New Enigmas and the co-author of Set the Night on Fire. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. Free shipping for many products!