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 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...

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...

My father left home when I was an infant. My one memory of him? My fourth birthday at my grandmother Minnie's house, his mother. He brought me a fuzzy chicken toy, picked me up, stayed for a while and was gone, never to surface again. There went at least one version of my family story.This story could apply to millions of people in this country. Endless discussions have taken place around why and how families break up, but the fact is they do. At the time I saw my father, I had no ...

Los Angeles Times Bestseller**This riveting tour through 1960s Los Angeles is a “history from below, in the very best sense” as it celebrates the “grassroots heroes and struggles” of the social movements of the era (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes).“Authoritative and impressive.” —Los Angeles Times“Monumental.” —Guardian**Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval....

A global guidebook to the "utopias" being constructed—in cities, deserts, and on islands—in a capitalist era unfettered by union and state regulations.A New York Times Art and Architecture Critic's PickAlthough they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as "The World...

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 ...

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...

This book offers practical, affordable process improvement strategies tailored specifically for small businesses. It emphasizes that people are the heart of any successful operation and explains how focusing on value-added activities can transform your business into a lean, agile, and customer-responsive enterprise. Without burdening you with costly or complex systems, this guide states that the "magic potion" to streamline processes, boost efficiency, and drive growth is something called ...

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 ...

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...

In a world where the boundaries between reality and the unknown blur, "Fault" Lines In Time" offers a collection of compelling short stories that delve into the supernatural and the mystical. Each tale explores the profound connections between the living and the lost, the ordinary and the extraordinary.In "Ancestors," a long-dead Japanese samurai grandfather rises from the past, confronting the specter of hate as he protects his family from a violent gang of skinheads.A you...