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Mike Davis

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles Paperback – March 10, 1992

by Mike Davis (Author), Robert Morrow (Photographer)

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The hidden story of L.A. Mike davis shows us where the city's money comes form and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

Print length

462 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

March 10, 1992
Dimensions

5.25 x 1 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0679738061
ISBN-13

978-0679738060
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mike Davis peers into a looking glass to divine the future of Los Angeles, and what he sees is not encouraging: a city--or better, a concatenation of competing city states--torn by racial enmity, economic disparity, and social anomie. Looking backward, Davis suggests that Los Angeles has always been contested ground. In the 1840s, he writes, a combination of drought and industrial stock raising led to the destruction of small-scale Spanish farming in the region. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was the scene of a bitter conflict between management and industrial workers, so bitter that the publisher of the Los Angeles Times retreated to a heavily fortified home he called "The Bivouac." And in 1992, much of the city fell before flames and riot in a scenario Davis describes as thus: "Gangs are multiplying at a terrifying rate, cops are becoming more arrogant and trigger-happy, and a whole generation is being shunted toward some impossible Armageddon." Davis's voice-in-a-whirlwind approach to the past, present, and future of Los Angeles is alarming and arresting, and his book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary affairs. --Gregory MacNamee

From the Publisher

"An eye-opening account of the economic, political, intellectual and architectural development of 20th-century Los Angeles, City of Quartz is a deeply troubling look at a city beset by environmental time bombs, vast inequities of wealth and chronic, increasingly brutal racial violence...The city that takes shape in this elegantly argued book seems to be swiftly heading toward some Armageddon...Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future."--Sara Frankel, The San Francisco Examiner

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (March 10, 1992)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 462 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679738061
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679738060
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #766,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #899 in Sociology of Urban Areas

Customer Reviews:
228 ratings

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Mike Davis

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Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.

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4 star		11%
3 star		6%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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A Rigorous and Challenging Expose of Los Angeles Culture and History

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 3, 2022

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I am currently reading CITY OF QUARTZ and I find it fascinating and illuminating. Davis depicts "The City of Angels" as a hybrid of heaven and hell, dream and nightmare, and a battleground for the ideological forces clashing in America, at large.

One person found this helpful

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Not Moses

Polemics Galore, but Clues in Abundance, as Well

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 26, 2015

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One need not go totalistic about this or any other book coming from a True Believer at either end of the political spectrum. Davis may =be= an over-the-top, over-identified-with-the-underdog, welfare-spraying ward healer (it gets worse in the later chapters), but that doesn't mean his observations should be ignored.

Having worked for several of the major downtown LA movers and shakers (Bank of America, Atlantic-Richfield, the Chandler-era Los Angeles Times (for Vance Stickle), Federated Department Stores, Carter-Hawley-Hale, the Los Angeles Central City Association (for former deputy mayor Steve Gavin)) as well as several of the major residential and commercial developers of the surrounding communities (American-Pacesetter (for John Klug), Pacific Mutual Life Insurance, Ernest W. Hahn, Cadillac-Fairview Ltd., the Alaska Teamsters Union Pension Fund, MCO Properties (for Charles Hurwitz), Landmark Land Company (for Ernie Vossler), Kohlberg-Kravis-Roberts via KSL Land) as a paid informer -- and dis-informer -- during the Central Business District Redevelopment campaign in 1975 and numerous municipal approval campaigns before and after, I was far enough inside to know that Davis was, as well.

Money talks, BS walks. The Big Boys knew this then, and they know it now. No one that I know of, however, has Pieced It All Together as elegantly and definitively, however rambling, tangential and (possibly) difficult to follow Davis's prose becomes at times. I respect the fact that having been there helps, but for the graduate -- or even upper-division undergrad -- student Looking for Clues, this is a gold mine... and not just about Los Angeles or even southern California. In most ways, this =is= the way things work pretty much everywhere.

42 people found this helpful

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Brian Maitland

socialist rant misses mark

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 11, 1999

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What a colossal disappointment this book turned out to be. I have a keen interest in L.A. but, despite a lot of great information in here, the thing is one big socialist rant against all that is L.A. I'm sorry, but I do not need it shoved down my throat that big business is bad and the LAPD are scum. Stating the obvious or picking on these targets is like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel. Give me something new!

The main problem with this tome is it's poorly edited. Take, for example, this sample sentence: "They described the Culture Industry not merely as political economy, but as a specific spatiality that vitiated the classical proportions of European urbanity, expelling from the stage both the 'masses' (in their heroic, history-changing incarnation) and the critical intelligensia." Besides swallowing the dictionary on this one (and many others) Davis shows he has yet to learn the Orwellian principle of writing clear, concise and well-constructed sentences.

Another major problem is his research seems to have been done mostly in the library. There are quotes that head sections within chapters but for someone presenting a broad social history and criticism of L.A., why not interview a few of the people who live there about the issues he brings about? Take the first chapter--72 pages of text, 168 footnotes. Let me repeat that--that's 168(!) footnotes. Are there any original thoughts in that chapter given the number of footnotes?

Also, for someone who rightly criticizes the L.A. Times for its political machinations, he certainly uses the Times as source material especially for statistics. If, on the one hand, he portrays the Times as a right-wing organ throughout pretty much most of its history, wouldn't you think, from a socialist's point of view, that quoting or reporting anything the Times says is counter to that?

Davis only truly writes well in the chapter "The Hammer and the Rock" which focuses on the LAPD's aggressive policing policy of ghetto areas. This chapter is as good as the excellent Miles Corwin book "The Killing Season" on the lives of two LAPD homicide detectives over one summer.

The last chapter on an area inland called Fontana seems to fit the Davis agenda. It's the place he grew up in but explain to me how relevant it is when it still remains a fringe area in L.A. history? Interesting but certainly not needed in this book. There are so many things Davis could have touched on in this book. In fact, when he focuses on the entertainment industry, it's on the Hollywood movie scene and about such sad things as how it devoured such talents as Fitzgerald and Faulkner when they came out West. Yet Hollywood is just one part of LA's entertainment history.

With his focus on the importance of land deals, it's surprising he left out the sports industry altogether. There is a goldmine of boondoggles in the Dodgers move from Brooklyn, the Oakland Raiders move south then back north, the Rams to Anaheim and then St. Louis, the growth of minor league baseball in the Inland Empire, etc. He does touch on music but doesn't get into it enough. And what of pop culture trends, fads, and wacko religions. Or even a focus on the drive-in religious temples that sprouted in L.A. He does get in his digs at L. Ron Hubbard, but that's it.

In other hands this could have been a tremendous book. All that was needed was a little objectivity and less socialist rancor (and I'm not saying this because I'm some kind of right-wing Nazi, I enjoyed Howard Zinn's "People's History of the US" as that was well-written and felt like I wasn't being lectured to.).

30 people found this helpful

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Paul Frandano

Blowing the Whistle on the City of Angels

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 30, 2000

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Mike Davis's white hot rant gives the great anti-city precisely the rhetorical slapping around it deserves. Don't be put off by the author's undisguised, unvarnished, old-fashioned Marxist biases--Chairman Mao once observed, "we Marxists disdain to conceal our views," and Davis makes his clear--because he's spot on: this is a city built by scoundrels on a foundation of perfidy and despoliation. Not a novel observation, true; mainstream historians, scores of journalists of every persuasion, and, yes, Roman Polanski also point this out, but Davis's narrative has far splashier colors and a high entertainment quotient. Alas, the book drops one star for what I judge to be its unevenness--the first two chapters are brilliant, the concluding chapter on Fontana is very fine, the remainder simply less so but still worthy. (Another, minor, beef--the excellent photographs, and there are many, are not given very respectful reproduction.) That said, City of Quartz is an indispensible tour of some of the darker corners of LA's famous story and an informative guide for those who have long looked for help in articulating precisely "why I really, really don't like Los Angeles."

26 people found this helpful

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Alonso Lopez

Impressive

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 15, 2014

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I have lived 5 years in Los Angeles and I have to say reading this book has completely changed my perception of the city. Coming from another continent, names like Hollywood and Beverly Hills were familiar to me before arrival, but I knew nothing about Pasadena "Old Money" or South Central struggles. And even after years living here, I had some notions of the city history but I was far away from the rich and complex web of relationships unveiled by this book. Reading this book left me craving for more readings, I think I will go over the book again and read some of the books mentioned in the citations

20 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

The urban study of Los Angeles past,present and future

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 13, 2017

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Los Angeles has many histories and Mike Davis relates each one in this classic book on its urban story.If theres one book you should read on the history of LA this is it.

2 people found this helpful

Mr. Richard Marris

Eye opening

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2016

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A well-written dissection of capitalism and the landscapes it creates. The fate of Fontana, in particular, reads like a black comedy.

One person found this helpful

Pedro Miguel Almeida

Technical Book - Urban Sociology, Urban Studies

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on October 28, 2019

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Just amazing because the high expectations that Mike Davis create on us are always fulfilled. A great partner for researchers, helping in the built of the theoric framework, easying your job in the fieldwork.

Frank Lutz

great book

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on January 7, 2021

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alles bestens

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Klient serwisu Amazon

Worth to give it a try!

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on July 10, 2017

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I've been looking forward to read this one for a long time. And here it is. Complicated stuff, surely not for everyone, but fascinating and compelling. Worth to give it a try.

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City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles Paperback – March 10, 1992

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