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 ...

THE BEST-SELLING MODERN CLASSIC: The world’s leading urbanist offers a “profound . . . brilliant” account of the rise of the world’s slums and the failures of modern urbanization (Arundhati Roy, activist and Booker Prize–winning author).According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urb...

This comprehensive study of class struggle in America asks: Why has there never been a mass working class party in the U.S.?“One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written—brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched.” —Village VoicePrisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and po...

This global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer).“ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The IndependentExamining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in th...

For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography.In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the...

The social critic and Set the Night on Fire co-author tackles the fashion for empires and white men's burdens in this 2007 collection of radical essays.With In Praise of Barbarians, Mike Davis skewers contemporary idols such as Mel Gibson, Niall Ferguson, and Howard Dean; unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system; visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the border; predicts ethnic cleansing in New ...

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardIs the capital of Latin America a small island at the mouth of the Hudson River? Will California soon hold the balance of power in Mexican national politics? Will Latinos reinvigorate the US labor movement?These are some of the provocative questions that Mike Davis explores in this fascinating account of the Latinization of the US urban landscape. As he forefully shows, this is a demographic and cultural revolution with extraordinary...

From Coconut Trees To Cults offers a critical examination of the evolution of religion from a skeptical viewpoint, arguing that religious beliefs and practices are primarily human constructs shaped by psychological, social, and environmental factors rather than divine influence. The author explores the cognitive foundation of religion, suggesting that human brains are wired to seek patterns and assign meaning, leading to the emergence of supernatural beliefs as coping mechanisms for uncert...

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 stree...

A witty and engrossing look at Los Angeles' urban ecology and the city's place in America's cultural fantasiesEarthquakes. Wildfires. Floods. Drought. Tornadoes. Snakes in the sea, mountain lions, and a plague of bees. 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. By brilliantly juxtaposing L.A.'s fragile natu...

The MacArthur Fellow and author of Dead Cities presents a terrifying forecast of a new global threat—and "its argument is irrefutable" ( The Independent).Hailed by The Nation as a "master of disaster prose," author and activist Mike Davis addresses the imminent catastrophe of Avian influenza. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least forty million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another global outbr...

The brilliant and disturbing 100-year history of modern terrorism and car bombs—the ubiquitous weapon of urban mass destructionOn a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s prototype the car bomb has evolved into a “poor man’s air force,” a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Ok...