This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker)
No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. 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 L.A.’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.
- ISBN10 1786635895
- ISBN13 9781786635891
- Publish Date 17 July 2018 (first published 29 October 1990)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Verso
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 512
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781786635891