City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Written by Mike Davis

Narrated by Tim Campbell

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781977377043

Mike Davis

R. Michael Davis is Professor of Plant Pathology at University of California, Davis. Robert Sommer is Distinguished Professor of Psychology Emeritus at University of California, Davis, and the author of Personal Space and Tight Spaces, among other books. John A. Menge is Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology at University of California, Riverside.

Reviews for City of Quartz

[laurieae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this book and the follow up Ecology of Fear - enjoyed both. I would highly recommend both of these titles to anyone even remotely interested in the craziness which is Southern California.

[j_wendel_cox_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A quintessential text of the New Western History and the most important work on Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century.

[takeitorleaveit_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

was forced to read this in an English class at Santa Monica College in 2004. The epitome of a biased environmentalist, I was forever scared of the type after reading this and the debacle of how inaccurate it was afterward. the dude was like the Wikipedia of the 90's flat out lying cause he could...

[bruchu_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Even Better Than The Original

I recently re-read this updated edition of the classic "City of Quartz" by noted socialist scholar Mike Davis. This text is quickly becoming a classic and belongs alongside the great urban sociological texts such as Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

The history of the development of Los Angeles is really like no other story in America, and indeed the world. And while some may not appreciate the Marxist interpretations and the dialectical method which Davis uses, nevertheless, the depth of intellectual analysis is simply breathtaking. When the original book was written, Davis correctly foreshadowed the Rodney King riots.

Davis pulls no punches in his research. He covers the early railroad and oil speculators, Otis and Harry Chandler, the development of Hollywood, Catholicism in LA, defense industrial production, postwar suburbanization, Kaiser steel, housing covenants, the Watts riots, large Japanese investments of the 80s, and more and more. The book is extremely dense so prepare to spend several weeks, maybe even months to fully absorb the details. Certainly whole books can be written on each of the major topical areas.

Included in this new edition are some fabulous new photos, all by Robert Morrow. The extended prologue in the new edition isn't anything revolutionary, but Davis does update the recent history of Los Angeles.

Obviously, I recommend this book, especially for anyone wanting a deeper intellectual, cultural, and social understanding of the major ideological undercurrents that make up the wonderful city of Los Angeles.

[argyriou · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Tediously marxist.

Davis is infected with the idea that nothing good happens unless it is progress towards Socialism, and nothing bad happens when it is performed by the "marginalized" or "alienated" of society. This idea blinds him to the vigor any dynamism of Los Angeles, and to the benefits that have accumulated to anyone other than the rich, or the middle-class white homeowners who are the secondary demons of his story. If one is capable of filtering out all the marxian cant and "un-class-angle" the text, it can be quite informative on both the shifts of the power structure in Los Angeles and the sources of the Tax Revolt of the 1970s and 1980s, but the book is otherwise an unrewarding slog.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The best book I read this year. Enlightening, frightening, and depressing at the same time. Hidden history, especially that of the US is very interesting. Especially that of the social movement and an undemocratic southern California.