Mike Davis can be very hit and miss. This book consists of lots of 5-page rants for Socialist magazines. I should have known this wouldn't be one of his better books, but I was excited to read his take-down of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" It was alright.

A great collection of essays on the American political-economic system.

I have read several things by Mike Davis, mostly Urban Theory, but lately I have been branching out. He is an incredible writer, thinker and social critic. Leave it to say, nothing I read here surprised me, believing completely that America is an empire on the decline. But I still got really pissed when I read the essays. He skewers a lot of "sacred American stuff" and leaves you with an ugly taste in your mouth for America and her ruling class. Here is the final paragraph from the Afterword: In De Ste. Croix's opinion, those vampires," the Roman and Byzantine upper classes, not the maligned "barbarians" (Goths, Vandals, Huns and Arabs), were the true looters and destroyer of Classical civilization. "As I see it, the Roman political system (especially when Geek democracy had been wiped out ) facilitated a most intense and ultimately destructive economic exploitation of the great mass of the people, whether slave or free, and it made radical reform impossible. The result was that the propertied class, the men of real wealth, who had deliberately created this system for their own benefit, drained the life-blood from their world and thus destroyed Graeco-Roman civilization over a large part of the empire....." It remains to be seen who will cry for the new Rome on the Potomac. It is a great book, now back to William Faulkner.

My man was cooking!

Despite sloppy editing and a somewhat idiosyncratic use of words like "antinomy," the substance of these essays makes for provocative reading.

WOW!!! Davis continues to be the most eloquent leftist writer of the day! I generally don't follow radical works but the analysis of the 2006 midterm elections alone is worth the price. The analogies to Imperial Rome are sublime and the phantasmogoric, vertigo-inducing leaping from New Orleans to the Mexican border to Puerto Vallarta to 1930s Chicago, to 1840s Paris. Bravo!

Reading Davis' takes and analyses about the 2000s feels at times wild: the US election of 2024 stares back at the reader when the author describes the 2004 election. It's refreshing, somewhat eye-opening and comforting to see a socialist historian and activist understand his time and its trends and dynamics this accurately. It shows that paying attention and being involved while having the right tools to grasp what's going on leads to corrects assessments even in the moment. Being used to seeing pundits and politicians largely clueless ir confused, this book and its author give hope... despite the fact that the world seemingly only got worse since it was written.

A ROBUST AND WIDE RANGING WRITER

Theres few in the same league as Mike Davis - he has all the attributes of a good essayist, he can write well, with humour and wit, and can make the inexplicable comprehensible in a relatively short space.

He writes on a wide range of topics in this collection of essays - from the post hurricane Katrina ethnic cleansing of New Orleans to figures past and present in the American Union movement. His speciality is California, his home state, and his point of view is that of the underdog: the Latinos, blacks and the working and underclass. America isnt the sole subject of the essays either, a short essay celebrates the efforts of "Private Ivan" - the ordinary russian soldier who bore the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany. Many of the other essays are informed by an awareness of history and the world beyond Americas borders.

The essays are easily comprehensible to a non American and offer a fascinating take on America that stands in stark contrast to pretty much anything you'll see in the mainstream media, or a month of sundays worth of cable/satellite reality tv slush. Read it - and laugh and weep and be informed. America will never look the same.

This is the first Mike Davis I have read. I didn't know it was a collection of older essays from the Bush years. It's not directly topical, but it certainly has bearing on our current moment. There's at times a bit too much 00's liberalism rhetoric (e.g. slagging on the South, "Dubya") but it still is a good contemporary analysis of the world then (and what it wrought).

Leftish political essays from the Bush II era. God those years sucked only being eclipsed by the Suckier Trump/Biden era. We forget just how bad Bush II was with the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, and his "compassionate conservatism" as a placeholder for American Theocracy ending in the Housing Bubble and Wall street Bailout. He was bad now we are in a worse place in part thanks to his actions.

Collection of essays from the Bush era from the author of City of Quartz. A good reminder that I'm not crazy when I'm remembering those years. Depressing in that none of the issues covered by the essays (militarism, environmental destruction, inequality, corporatization, legal political corruption, etc) have been addressed in the course of the 11-18 years since they were written.

Mike Davis is an old-school, die-hard US socialist who has been causing trouble for over 40 years now, this book is a great collection of his work since late 2001 though it is not anywhere as much about the Roman Empire or barbarians (in the classical sense) as I thought. Davis titles and a few epigraphs evocative of Roman history-- Romans at Home, Legions at War, The Unease in Gaul, Dark Water Rising, and Old Flames -- to discuss US politics, the US war machine, the hell that is home for David- California, catastrophic climate change, and brief histories of inspiring workers, activists, and revolutionaries of the past.

The book moves quickly from essay-to-essay, since most were written for his regular column in Socialist Review or newspapers in California and France, so it is easy to stay committed. Some of the first section is a bit out-dated, it would have been great to read in-the-moment but yesterday's reporting is just that; the books gets better and better as it goes, though, so I speak highly of it.