Most of the Essays are available on-line.

Mike Davis is a treasure, and a proud (adopted?) California son. He's a leftist's leftist; and even though those seem to have gone out of style, it's hard to argue that his trenchant, doctrinaire, and dot-connecting screeds aren't spellbinding, if not persuasive. He's also a writer's writer, but unlike most modern writers on the left--does a true left still exist in the United States?--he uses plain language, avoids acronyms like the gutless vampires of meaning that they are, and always talks about people and places and events, not about vapid, shadowy, mean-whatever-you-want-them-to-mean movements and tendencies and isms.

In Praise of Barbarians collects many of his essays published between 2001 and 2007, and while I didn't understand the structure of the book at first, it started to make sense by the third section. The essays range from comically short to middling in length. None of them are terribly long, which is a double-edged sword because he goes into such depth so quickly that I often wanted to learn more, but I also liked the pace of the book.

The essays were written over the time period when I would have called myself a leftist, so I remember many of the events, people, and arguments he makes, especially in the first section. There are some spectacular historical essays whose subjects are new to me, and there's even an actual comic essay about why Davis drives the car he does, although it would be easy to take it too seriously, especially by the current young generation, with its inability to tell the difference among irony, the generation's own "unified" political philosophy, and an Onion article.

Speaking of young generations, one of my favorite essays is the last one, "Riot Nights on Sunset Strip," which taught me a lot about a heretofore unknown-to-me movement from Greater Los Angeles, where I grew up. (I never knew Stephen Stills's "For What It's Worth [Stop, Hey What's That Sound]" was about L.A. teenagers protesting against ten p.m. county and city curfews!) There are some other gems too--in fact, there are only a couple of essays that I don't like, but they're well written; they're just not up to my notion of Mike Davis's standards.

Criticize Davis for his righteous socialism, unwavering class consciousness, and anti-imperialist anarcho-syndicalist tendencies all you want. He may be wrong about some of his interpretations of history (I don't always agree with him); but he's pretty good, sadly, at predicting the future, as when he wrote originally in 2007 that

"The bloodbath in Iraq has opened every sarcophagus on the Potomac, disgorging a palsied army of ancient secretaries of state and national security advisers . . . [including], of course, the chief mummy, Kissinger himself, eager to lecture Congress on 'rational' approaches to imposing American will on the rest of the world. Hillary Clinton, of course, is the Queen of the Realists (except when it conflicts with Israeli interests), and the new Democratic majority in the House is unlikely to stray very far from the already manifest script of her 2008 campaign. In future debates with Rudy Giuliani or John McCain . . . , Hillary is poised to be a hard-muscled G.I. Jane, parrying every macho gesture with even tougher stances on al-Qaeda, Iran, Palestine, and Cuba."

If Davis's most pugnacious, stridently anti-capitalist essays don't interest you, you can probably skip some of the ones that originally appeared in Socialist Review, but I caution you against ignoring Davis too much. Even if you disagree with him, you're bound to learn a great deal from his research and scholarship. He could have been a muckraking journalist in a different era, and that's exactly why I wanted to continue to read about people I had never heard of in places I didn't know I cared about. I knew, for example, that Cary McWilliams almost single-handedly saved The Nation magazine from financial collapse and certain death in the 1950s--oh how I wish even The Nation of the late '90s and early 2000s still existed, rather than its current iteration, with its lockstep (or, more accurately, finger-snapping) acceptance of and reverence for every single academic indentitarian fad--but I had no idea that McWilliams had such a long and storied history of agitating for workers' and poor people's rights in California before he moved to Manhattan. It was necessary to save the magazine, but at what cost to the future of California? Davis asks.

I do too, which is why I'm glad that Davis himself never left California, at least not for too long. He's a Mensch of the highest order, and someone who challenges the way I think. Thank God for the true believers, even if they don't believe in God, and thank God for Mike Davis.