A celebrated urban historian’s bestselling account of the global explosion of slums. According to the united nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt. ....
History of the car bomb traces the political development of this influential weapon of terror and resistance
In this provocative history, Mike Davis traces the car bomb's worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.
A fully updated edition of Mike Davis's visionary work.
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....
“An urgent, important must-read.”—Jeff Chang, author Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
In Nadie es ilegal, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacon expose the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and put a human face on the immigrants who daily risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. Countering the mounting chorus of anti-immigrant voices, Nadie es ilegal debunks the leading ideas behind the often-violent right wing backlash against immigrants, revealing their deep roots in US history, and documents the new civil rights movement that has mounted protests around the country to demand justice and dignity for immigrants.
Nadie es ilegal features moving, evocative photos from award-winning photographer Julian Cardona.
Justin Akers Chacon is a professor of US history and Chicano studies in San Diego, California. He has contributed to the International Socialist Review and the book Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints.
Mike Davis is a historian, activist, and author of many acclaimed books, including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California at Irvine. He received a 2007 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.
The author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums attacks the current fashion for empires and white men's burdens in this blistering collection of radical essays. He skewers contemporary idols such as Mel Gibson, Niall Ferguson, and Howard Dean; unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system; visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the border; predicts ethnic cleansing in New Orleans more than a year before Katrina; recalls the anarchist avengers of the 1890s and "teeny-bopper" riots on the Sunset Strip in the 1960s; discusses the moral bankruptcy of the Democrats in Kansas and West Virginia; remembers "Private Ivan," who defeated fascism; and looks at the future of capitalism from the top of Hubbert's Peak.
No writer in the United States today brings together analysis and history as comprehensively and elegantly as Mike Davis. In these contemporary, interventionist essays, Davis goes beyond critique to offer real solutions and concrete possibilities for change.
Mike Davis is the author many books, including City of Quartz, The Ecology of Fear, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in San Diego.
