Mike Davis is a mental giant. I knew next to nothing about Los Angeles until I dove into this treasure trove of information revealing the shaddy history and bleak future of the City of Quartz. For me, Davis is almost too clever and at times he is hard to follow, but that is why I like his work. Check out how he traces the rise of gangs in Los Angeles after the blue-collar, industrial jobs bailed out in the 1960s. Must read if you consider LA home.

City of Quartz offered a really, really in-depth view of Los Angeles from both bird's eye and microcosmic perspectives. I feel like I got a sense of the city, but at the cost of reading quite a bit of dense material that repeats itself at times.

a mixed bag of some genuinely fascinating and evocative chapters and also some of the most didactic, snooze-fest chapters.

The author is a great researcher but not great at forming narrative. This is okay when the chapters are more sociology/culture/architecture-centered but not so much when the chapters are more focused on the minutia of housing law or catholic power structures.

I have no idea why he dedicated the final chapter on a book about LA to Fontana…

Mike Davis was a genius but this book is hard to read. Come for the brilliant dissection of LA’s dystopian urban planning, but why I read 55 pages on the rise and fall of its Catholic diocese still escapes me…

Good. Depressing! Davis brings LA's senselessness, its yawning inhumanity, into focus, unflinchingly depicting the kinds of internecine elite power struggles so central to our common ruin.

A thoroughly researched history of Los Angeles that transcends the Hollywood bias.

This was a book where I enjoyed some chapters much more than others. Some of the earlier chapters are esoteric and would read better with some prerequisite courses on political history; that’s my biggest gripe. The later chapters I found to be fascinating. Admittedly, this likely has to do more with my own background and interests rather than it the latter half of the book being inherently more compelling. Luckily, for the most part, each chapter stands alone and doesn’t require a full understanding of any other chapter to enjoy, so there’s no need to get bogged down in the minutiae of Los Angeles’s mid-century elite.

My favorite chapter was the final one on Fontana. It serves as a summary of one of the central points Davis makes about the bait and switch of the California dream and capitalist gluttony; from orange farms and endless summer to steel mills and smog.

It’s worth keeping in mind Davis’s own pro-union and socialist leanings when reading as well. This bleeds through on every page, so it’s best to read with an open mind and a critical eye.

I normally find history books painfully boring, especially about subjects that basically don’t concern me personally and are not related to anything I am already interested in (e.g., Los Angeles), so this wasn’t the easiest thing to convince myself to read. It was saved by Mike Davis’ fast-paced prose and unbelievably thorough and coherent historical archeology (how on earth did he write this before you could search digitally through archives for keywords?), delivered from a Marxist or at least “labor sympathetic” perspective. While this book was specifically about Los Angeles’ birth and growth, some of the points of analysis about that history are easily transferrable to other contexts: about land wars and water wars, policing and racism, religious institutions and their secular influences, urban development and decay, homelessness, poverty, “the war on drugs” and (again) racism, the flight of industries to more productive and/or profitable locales and the effects on the people left behind, foreign capital and investment, real estate speculation, etc etc etc.

I only wish there were books like this about the places I live

10/10

Written in one of the rawest époques of LA, with gang violence at its peak, police brutality, economic crisis, and hopelessness, Davis does a great job of narrating the history and power relations. Open racism, classism, and systemic oppression make the pieces of the complicated puzzle that is LA fit together. Los Angeles remains a beautiful city even as the blueprint for failed planning. Excellent book.

DNF baby! Bye Mike Davis ! You annoy me !

A brilliantly insightful and iconoclastic study of the history and likely futures of Los Angeles (in microcosm) and global capitalism (in macrocosm).

City of Quartz by Mike Davis is a history and analysis of the forces that shaped Los Angeles. Although the book was published in 1990, much of it remains relevant today.

My strongest endorsement for this book is that after reading it, I see my city totally differently. I don't mean that in an abstract sense. I mean literally, while driving last week, I noticed aspects of the physical environment I had never noticed before. (Davis has a sharp eye for irony, and if you enjoy his essay on urban design, check out "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture," a 2017 essay from Current Affairs magazine.) Another highlight was the devastating essay on the LAPD, which characterizes the police as a violent occupying force, and is credited with predicting the 1992 uprisings.

Davis divides the book into a prologue and 7 essays. These could be read individually, but major themes, especially regarding real estate and development, emerge more clearly when read as a single work.

The 7 essays are: (1) Sunshine or Noir?, which examines the mythification of the city, (2) Power Lines, which traces the complex web of people and institutions that rule LA, (3) Homegrown Revolution, which outlines how homeowner's associations control land use, (4) Fortress LA, which covers the role that architecture plays in policing boundaries, (5) The Hammer and The Rock, a takedown of the LAPD, (6) New Confessions, which examines the tentacles of the Catholic church, and (7) Junkyard of Dreams, an elegy for the suburb of Fontana.

Admittedly, the writing is dense. Some sections are unnecessarily academic. I wish that the photos, which are excellent, were printed in higher resolution. There is a long section on City Council alliances in the 1980s that is obviously much less relevant now than it was 30 years ago. Regardless, this book changed the way I see my city, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the dark side of Los Angeles.

Mike Davis is twice as fun to read than most histories because Mike Davis is independent, not subject to the whims and pieties of academia and the market of prestige. Mike Davis is twice as hard to read than most histories because he's independent, relentlessly documenting the brutality and broken promises and money flows and power brokers of Los Angeles without giving the reader any of the mercy someone who gave a shit about becoming popular or recognized would give them.
There's many, many fun moments in this book, weird little nuggets that are recognizably Pynchonian (there's a shoutout in on the jacket cover to Pynchon, and then Davis himself calls Pynchon one of the best social critics of California in Vineland). I bet Davis loved Inherent Vice.
At the same time, the second chapter on the flow of power in Los Angeles was close to unreadable because there were so many characters and so many geographic descriptions (without maps!) that I couldn't tell who or what he was talking about. WASPs downtown, Jews on the Westside. The L.A. Times as a reputation laundering machine for the WASPs. Is that about it? The chapter wouldn't have fit anywhere else, as he starts with these three huge thematic chapters and then moves into smaller explorations of the police, of the suburbs, and of NIMBYism/homelessness, but I found those smaller explorations so much more interesting than the chapter about power brokers that I wished he'd just removed it.
Anyway, L.A. has the EXACT SAME problems today as it had when Davis wrote this, for the exact same reasons.