City of Quartz

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

By: Mike Davis

Narrated by: Tim Campbell

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 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.

In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. 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. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city's current status.

©1990 Verso; Preface 2006 by Mike Davis (P)2018 Tantor

Multifaceted history of a city

Interesting perspectives on Greater Los Angeles, a city I moved to in 1989 -- a year before this book was published.

It covers lots of ground and provides backgrounds of many names I've encountered -- the Chandlers, Hell's Angels, and Kaiser Permanente.

I especially appreciated the essay exploring the history of the archdiocese of Los Angeles with the long tradition of Celtic bishops over a largely Latinx flock.

The reader does make some pronunciation errors which stumble over the authority of the author. Pico Rivera becomes "Riviera" and Los Feliz unhappily becomes "Felix".

good not great

needs to be updated and bridged to 2021. good history but not end of story

A fascinating history of So Cal. land ownership & business.

A fascinating cautionary history of So Cal. land ownership & business. Famous families, secrets, why things failed, or succeeded, who’s who today & how they got there.
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Winston Churchill / George Santayana

Carefully elaborates LA in historical character

LA is presented as not a given, but as social relations made, unmade and remade in historical time, choices made by individual and group actors yes, but under conditions they ultimately didn't choose.

The metaphor of noir ties in nicely with the felt inexorability of political, social, and geographical upheavals and conflicts given the broader context of forces and relations in motion. Yet, despite this, Davis gives a sense of rebellion even in its most cynical and nihilistic forms as a creative as well as creatively destructive force. The contending classes may end in ruin but not without a fight.

good political history of LA

the narrator speaks too fast for my taste. hard to digest all the info at that speed. other than that, a lot of interesting information about LA