In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status. 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. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs L.A.’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. 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. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker) This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A.
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