Audiobook15 hours
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Written by Mike Davis
Narrated by Tim Campbell
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
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.
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.
Author
Mike Davis
Mike Davis (1946–2022) was the author of City of Quartz as well as Dead Cities and The Monster at Our Door, co-editor of Evil Paradises, and co-editor—with Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller—of Under the Perfect Sun (The New Press).
More audiobooks from Mike Davis
Planet of Slums Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to City of Quartz
Related audiobooks
Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEverything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNecessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Miami and the Siege of Chicago Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhite Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Romance of American Communism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Spectre, Haunting Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
United States History For You
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: 2nd Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untold History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Charlie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Up From Slavery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5John Adams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): An American History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wright Brothers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for City of Quartz
Rating: 4.060538313901345 out of 5 stars
4/5
223 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Read 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A quintessential text of the New Western History and the most important work on Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5was 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...
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Even Better Than The OriginalI 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.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Tediously 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 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.