Between 2003 and 2007, Mike Davis wrote a lot of short articles for the Socialist Review. He also wrote for the Guardian occasionally, and here and there another article appeared. Together, they form this book. It has been given a (very alluring) premise in the praise of barbarians, but only a few epigraphs and a page-long afterward serve to address that premise. It is hardly an organized, purpose-written text, but a good collection of Davis' incidental targets.

The book is separated into four sections:
1) "Romans at Home": musings on the then-running US elections, wherein Davis captures the popular mood and the collapse of the Democratic party's capture on working class and African-American politics
2) "Legions at War": discussions of the US imperial machine's wars and violence across the globe. Short, but very charged.
3) "The Unease in Gaul": essays focused on California and its politics. Much about Governor Schwarzenegger; more, and this is very perceptive, about the corrosive hate spewed by radio shows that most Californian commuters are predisposed to fall into.
4) "Dark Water Rising": climate change and the USA's absolute inability - and calculated vulnerability - to the destruction of that change. Lots here about Louisiana and New Orleans.
5) "Old Flames": the voices of opposition and change that Davis believes in, from Malcolm X and the socialists of America at the turn of the century (the 19th century, that is) to the teenagers in California and the Russian soldiers of World War II. Includes a fascinating interview about anarchists and terrorists that gestures to a project that I would hope Davis is continuing to work on, in whatever spare time he has.

Davis is highly readable, eminiently learned, and always principled. He is now always right, as these essays show (his dismissal of Barack Obama as a wildcard is a case in point), but he is always thoughtful and informed. And he is sharply attuned to the violence and the hope that forms our world. It's often not that he says something no one else knows; it's that he writes with conviction and brings together a range of too-often unheard voices, together with a pragmatic focus on socialism as a the chief solution to many current societal problems engendered by capitalist capture of governance and sociality (not to mention the US Democratic Party's long disdain for the working class and its abstraction from the concerns of the American people, having given in to corporate finance's money and politics). Here he is on climate change in 2005:

The demon in me wants to say: party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when we'll soon be debating how many hunter-gatherers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon. The good parent in me, however, screams: how is it possible that we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children's children will themselves have children? Let Exxon answer that in one of their sanctimonious ads.

If there is revolutionary thought here, it is motivated by that concern for the future: for children and the world they will inherit.

I always struggle with essay collections, but Mike Davis more than any writer has given me clarity and perspective in this difficult year. I appreciate so much his writing and memories of a time with plenty of lessons for our own.

It's a good book to get a sense of the range of Mike Davis's subject matter. Despite the abundant quantity of quantitative sources giving his writing a fact sandwich flavor, his polemics are deliciously digestible. The chapters on Left politics in Greenland & Upton Sinclare's EPIC campaign(End Poverty In California) are the mustard and sauerkraut.

It's depressing and frustrating enough to keep up with current events, there's no joy in reading and re-living the events, the corruptions and the moral cowardice of the years of the Bush presidency. And yet here we are. It's a great read, Davis is a solid writer and his analyses of Iraq, Katrina, the Minutemen and the California recall look more spot-on than ever. Sharp, barbed, accurate critiques. Worthwhile collection, but a downer considering how meager our progress has been in the intervening years. I actually finished the book last week but didn't even want to deal with writing a review and thinking about it any further

a bit sloppy. more substantive comments to come.

Just awesome. Puts the beltway opinion-makers to shame.

Enjoyable, interesting and wide-ranging collection of anti-imperialist essays in the author's imitable style

In a January 2008 interview, Alex Green asked Noam Chomsky, "What was your favorite book of last year?" Chomsky could not name only one favorite nor could he name them all.
Chomsky suggested, among others "In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire" by Mike Davis.

Some of these essays are a bit past shelf-date (the book comprises his journalism pieces since 2001), but Davis is consistent, and if you liked his longer, quirky social/historical books (City of Quartz, the disaster book I can't recall the name of...) the short pieces give you a context on his socialist pedigree and current political outlook, keeps yer bullshit detector nicely tuned. Good subway read--each piece is about one bus-to-train transfer long.

About 80% of this book focuses on the failures of certain American political parties/politicians with a nod towards how the other guys could do it better. Or if not that, how real democracy would fix such-and-such issue. I have no interest in this. A majority of these pieces were written for Socialist magazines, which creates a rather detestable orientation to an otherwise reasonable historian.

There is one stand-out piece (interview, really) in which Davis discuses a project he seems to at one point have been working on, called Heroes of Hell. This project of his was (is?) looking to create a broad history of late 19th and early 20th century attentats and anarchist assassinations. Despite the poor turnout of most projects like this, Davis' looks like it might have been worthwhile. Unfortunately, the interview took place in 2003, and this book has never received any other mention. It seems possible that some of the research was absorbed into Buda's Wagon, but the rest may never appear.

I really just got this because I like the title so much....Well, and Davis is one of the left's premier historians. Anarchists may not be fond of him, but he digs up the history of the working class like no other.
Those were the best parts of this collection--the IWW, the anarchist assassins from around the world at the turn of the last century, and so on. A lot of this deals with the election in 2004, the start of the Iraq war, and the devestation in the aftermath of the government's calculated failure to prepare before and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The election stuff isn't worth your time, but the stuff on New Orleans is a good reminder.
I would recommend skimming these essays and picking out the parts that sound interesting.

In Praise of Barbarians is a collection of articles written by Mike Davis, most for the journal Socialist Review. Davis is a socialist writer living in San Diego. He's been an activist since his high school days, once serving as southern California organizer for the SDS in the mid 1960s.

He writes in a very engaging style - slightly ironic, seldom doctrinaire. Even if you don't share his socialist viewpoint you might still enjoy many of his articles. His perspective is that of an engaged political activist, with a deep skepticism and contempt for the mass media lies and distortions that we are daily subjected to. For those of us who are disgusted with the current lack of journalistic integrity in the mainstream media, Davis reminds us that this is not a new phenomenon. He writes at length about the Sunset Strip protests from 1966-1968, and quotes the LA Times at length: even then, the Times was a tool of the conservative business interests in LA, and journalistic integrity was never allowed to get in the way of pushing their viewpoint. By the way, the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth" ("There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear, ...") was based on the Sunset Strip protests / police riots.

The unifying theme running through these articles is that of America as an imperialist nation in decline. Objectively that seems incontrovertible. The illegal conquest of Iraq, US troops stationed in over a hundred countries worldwide, worldwide support for dictatorships and right-wing oligarchies, refusal to be bound by international law - any one of these would be sufficient proof of imperialism. And that the US is in decline is evident to us all. Our economy has been built on a foundation of sand for the past 25 years as one administration after another has sought to export jobs and import cheap goods, converting our country into a nation of consumers rather than producers.

Strangely, though, I found that Davis' articles were cause for hope. We can change our country for the better. We need to look objectively at what works and at what hasn't worked and make the right decisions. The electoral process will probably not do us much good. Little progress has ever been achieved in America via the ballot box. The vote for women, civil rights, improvements in labor conditions, and environmental protections have all come from mass movements and pressure from masses of ordinary people. It can happen again.