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Verso City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, New Edition

by Verso

Product Tags:
city, excavating future los, quartz, quartz excavating future

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Product Detail Information:

ASIN:	1844675688
Sales Rank:	62830
Catalog:	Book
Binding:	Paperback
Product Group:	Book
Product Type:	Abis Book
Manufacturer:	Verso
EAN:	9781844675685
Publication Date:	2006-09-04
Number Of Items:	1

Features:

ISBN13: 9781844675685
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description:

A fully updated edition of Mike Davis's visionary work.

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.

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Kara S. Christianson

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful

Order Perfect

7/7/2009

Book was said to be in 'fair to good' condition: and it is. It's a bit worn, but all good books are. I would definitely buy from this seller again. Thank you.

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J. C. Dixon

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

A provocative (but over-reaching) essay on urban inequality

12/23/2008

Several years ago I picked this book up on a business trip to L.A. and couldn't put it down. Since then I've become an armchair aficionado of L.A./Southland history and returned to explore the area as often as I can afford. This book has to be compared to the likes of Heidi and Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" and so forth. It's part essay, part history, and part futurism. As with the "Third Wave" it's full of breathless pronouncements of WHAT HAS BEEN and WHAT WILL BE--except this is more of a dystopian nightmare. Like it or not, L.A. has been the most important city in America--probably the world--since World War Two. This comes thanks to the advent of TV, which sold the world on "fun in the sun." So, if you want to read one grand pronouncement on the darkest possible outcome of modern urban inequality, this is a good one. Just figure it won't turn out as badly as he predicts. Mike Davis is like a stopped clock of the analog variety. He's going to be right twice a day. But it sure is fun to read him going on about it.

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Daniel Lobo

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Still Too Valid. Davis Milestone for Urban Studies

9/21/2008

An unfortunate classic for urban studies. It might be all too valid... Actually it might be gaining validity as time progresses...

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Christopher Dipasquale

3 of 12 people found the following review helpful

One of the most boring books I've ever read

2/10/2008

I caught Mike Davis on an HBO Documentary about gangs in Southern California, and this book was referenced many times. As a resident of Southern California, I was anxious to learn more about the new megalopolis that I now called home.

I anxiously began reading the book, but quickly became disinterested by Mike Davis's relentlessly dry and academic approach in telling the story of Los Angeles. There would be absolutely no mistaking the fact that Mike Davis is an academic, and not a story teller.

The reader is subjected to a million tiny facts about everything that ever happened throughout the history of the city, and by concentrating on every piece of bark on every tree the reader is denied the view of the forrest. It literally felt like this was a book I had to read for some kind of class or homework assignment, and I had to will myself to finish it. I am a voracious reader, but I found this book to be virtually unreadable.

High marks to Mike Davis for the research that must have gone into this book, but low marks for keeping the reader engaged about the material.

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F. Daly

9 of 24 people found the following review helpful

Not Really About L.A.......

12/22/2007

As an avid fan of Los Angeles/Southland history, and having lived there from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, I was eager to get my hands on this book. Sadly, it isn't truly about Los Angeles. The author uses the city as a soapbox to espouse his political view of the world. Any city would do, to be sure. If you want to read a continuous stream of how the "haves" abuse the "have nots", how "power" is always bad and how the ultimate goal of every "majority" is to subjugate every "minority", then have a good read. Don't expect any factual basis or thoughtful analysis, however. This book is just "That's the way it is, thank you very much, and the place has gone to hell."

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Verso City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, New Edition

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