Book description
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…
Why read it?
2 authors picked City of Quartz as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A film noir in book form, Davis’ astute, visceral, and impassioned chronicle of Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium offers a dystopian view of future urban society.
I was recommended this book by my secondary school geography teacher shortly before starting university. Although my teacher did not know it, I had been questioning whether I’d made the right choice in choosing Geography for my degree, but this book captivated me like no other and assuaged my academic concerns.
Los Angeles is a world-famous city that means very different things to different people. Davis shows how Los Angeles is…
From Maxim's list on redefining your understanding of geography.
In this classic radical history of Los Angeles, a city where I spent most of my youth, Davis fuses a subterranean history of LA with a writer’s sensibility that includes a comprehensive view of the city through film and literature as well as his own hard-hitting analysis of class, race, city space, and power.
Davis gave me a way to see urban spaces as maps of political and economic power.
From Jim's list on urban wandering and subterranean history.
If you love City of Quartz...
Performance Anxiety
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
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