23 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Radical history of Los Angeles, February 25, 2007
This review is from: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition) (Paperback)
Davis is well-known in radical circles as a popular writer on various issues relating to labor movements and the like. This is essentially a history of the city of Los Angeles and its surroundings from a radical perspective. It's quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything. He also has the tendency to call historical incidences of repression a "holocaust" (he actually uses this word multiple times for different things), which I don't like being used in this manner. Aside from that though, it's a welcome different approach from the usual hagiographic or hip postmodern analyses of conglomeration cities like LA. There's not much more I can say about it, as whether you like his left-wing critical vignettes or not will be mostly a matter of taste - judge it for yourself.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Wretched unreadable writing but interesting info and arguments, June 9, 2011
This review is from: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition) (Paperback)
A mix of good and bad. Good: exhaustively researched, full of references, some of which I intend to read. A good starting point for many topics. I found his chapter on the history of Fontana fascinating. I also enjoyed the explanation of L.A.'s power elite and its development.
Bad: obsessive, and I mean OBSESSIVE, leftist bias. E.g., the Watts riots are the "Watts rebellion." E.g., his constant, grating mockery of the home ownership dreams of working class white people. E.g., Maxine Waters is a "respected legislator." Actually she's the epitome of the bigoted, shrill, corrupt black politician. E.g., "so-called blighted" areas or "purported high crime areas" the author cites are in fact, not just in his sarcasm, in many cases blighted and high crime and wracked by drugs (e.g., Pico-Union District). Visit it if you don't believe me. Teenagers will rush your car to offer you crack cocaine, fake green cards and underage Salvadoran girls.
Bad: The writing style is wretched. When an author has severe problems, don't publishers provide editors anymore? The author delights in using giant words where small ones would do. Even the well-educated reader needs a dictionary, preferably a huge one, at hand. He also is in love with giant sentences and enormous paragraphs. Junior high English teacher to Davis: short sentences! paragraph breaks!
The writing style is so poor that what could be a brisk, lively read (discounting the author's bias, of course) is not. I ran a sample through readability indexes like the Gunning Fog Index and the Flesch Index and it was off the charts. It is probably unreadable for a high school grad, very tough going for a bright college student, and an agonizing slog, thick as treacle, "dry as sawdust without butter" even for someone with a graduate school education and years of professional writing. (Like myself.) What a shame. Even a mechanical clean-up with smaller words, shorter sentences and four times the paragraph breaks would have transformed this book.
The small number of photos are excellent but very poorly reproduced. More photos, sharply printed, would have been worth thousands of words.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Urban History, September 17, 2011
This review is from: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition) (Paperback)
Someone from Los Angeles -- or with more knowledge than me -- might quibble with the conclusions Davis reaches or the ways in which he illuminates the city. However, as someone who is not from there and has never even been there, I found this to be a fascinating read about a place, its history, and its current sociology.
I thought his organization is excellent -- covering politics first and then weaving a story through gang culture, neighborhood topography, and religion -- and his writing is vivid. At several points, I found myself wishing books like this were available on other cities across the United States because I learned so much and thought about things so differently upon finishing it.
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