City of Quartz

Praise

“Davis’ work is the cruel and perpetual folly of the ruling elites.”
—New York Times

“As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies.”
—Dana Goodyear, New Yorker

“Los Angeles faces a perilous millennium whose emerging contours will surely have no more brilliant prophet or historian than Davis.”
—Alexander Cockburn

“A history as fascinating as it is instructive.”
—Peter Ackroyd, The Times

“At once intensely intellectual and visceral.”
—Contemporary Sociology

“Absolutely fascinating.”
—William Gibson

“Even as he offers vivid street-smart reportage (and frequently breathtaking prose), Davis projects a distinctive historical vision.”
—Adam Shatz, Lingua Franca

“Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future.”
—San Francisco Examiner

“Angelenos, now is the time to lean into Mike Davis’s apocalyptic, passionate, radical rants on the sprawling, gorgeous mess that is Los Angeles.”
—Stephanie Danler, author of Stray and Sweetbitter

“City of Quartz deserves to be emancipated from its parochial legacy … [It is] a working theory of global cities writ large, with as much to teach us about multiculturalism as it does racial apartheid in Los Angeles.”
—David Helps, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A wildly original analysis of the city on the threshold of the new millennium, the book synthesized knowledge about Los Angeles’s history, politics, culture, architecture, policing, immigration, and more, painting a dark picture that embodied a kind of American urban dystopia on steroids after the nightmare of Reaganism and the ‘developers’ millennium.’”
—Micah Uetricht, The Nation

“Dazzling.”
—Counterfire