Mike Davis

A powerful glimpse into the history of disaster in Los Angeles, both real or imagined, argues that the most destructive forces are the many movies and books depicting this city as a veritable hotbed of riots, fires, floods, and earthquakes as well as an apocalyptic locale. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

The hidden story of L.A. Mike Davis shows us where the city's money comes from and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world.From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz. Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the “war on terrorism” as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the nineteenth century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World.

On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s prototype the car bomb has evolved into a “poor man’s air force,” a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City.In this brilliant and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

A magisterial, kaleidoscopic, riveting history of Los Angeles in the SixtiesHistories of the US Sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. LA was a launchpad for Black Power--where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation--and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of "Asian America" as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, center of California counterculture.Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive history of LA in the Sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning LA history, City of Quartz, and picking up where the celebrated California historian Kevin Starr left off (his eight-volume history of California ends in 1963), Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardIs the capital of Latin America a small island at the mouth of the Hudson River? Will California soon hold the balance of power in Mexican national politics? Will Latinos reinvigorate the US labor movement?These are some of the provocative questions that Mike Davis explores in this fascinating account of the Latinization of the US urban landscape. As he forefully shows, this is a demographic and cultural revolution with extraordinary implications. With Spanish surnames increasing five times faster than the general population, salsa is becoming the predominant ethnic rhythm (and flavor) of contemporary city life. In Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and (shortly) Dallas, Latinos outnumber non-Hispanic whites; in New York, San Diego and Phoenix they outnumber Blacks. According to the Bureau of the Census, Latinos will supply fully two-thirds of the nation’s population growth between now and the middle of the 21st century when nearly 100 millions Americans will boast Latin American ancestry.Davis focuses on the great drama of how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. Pundits are now unanimous that Spanish-surname voters are the sleeping giant of US politics. Yet electoral mobilization alone is unlikely to redress the increasing income and opportunity gaps between urban Latinos and suburban non-Hispanic whites. Thus in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the militant struggles of Latino workers and students are reinventing the American left. Fully updated throughout, and with new chapters on the urban Southwest and the explodiing counter-migration of Anglos to Mexico, Magical Urbanism is essential reading for anyone who wants to grasp the future of urban AmericaThis paperback edition of Mike Davis’s investigation into the Latinization of America incorporates the extraordinary findings of the 2000 Census as well as new chapters on the militarization of the border and violence against immigrants.

A riveting exploration of the tensions between nature and the built environment. The storm is here, crushed dams no longer hold, the savage seas come inland with a hop. Jacob van Hoddis As Mike Davis shows, prophecies of urban doom too often come true. Beginning with a trip to New York's Ground Zero, Davis pairs the horror of lower Manhattan's falling skyscrapers with Las Vegas' delirious delight in blowing up its landmark hotels, where environmental terrorism is practiced in the name of urban development. We stop at "German Village," the Utah wasteland where Allied scientists once perfected their plans to destroy Berlin, then move on to Los Angeles, the frontline of a "Second Civil War" that lies waiting to be ignited in cities across the country. The title essay is an autopsy of the metropolis dead on a slab, with reflections on "bomber ecology" and "ghetto geomorphology." The final chapter, with accounts of Montreal and Auckland brought to their knees by ice storms and heat, warns that our urban infrastructures are as little prepared to deal with climate change as with car bombs and hijacked airliners.

Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis’s first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause—and solution—of the planetary environmental crisis?Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,” whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscape” of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,” which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880–1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.

In this substantially expanded edition of his earlier book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis looks at the COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping the world. He sets the current crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago that sounded a tocsin, disastrously ignored by those in power, for today’s devastating outbreak.In language both accessible and authoritative that, in a signature of Davis’ oeuvre, draws on a wide range of disciplines, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today’s viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.“Dizzying … In Mr. Davis's account, the world ends in fire, and the next time is now.”—The New York Times (on Davis’ Ecology of Fear)“Mike Davis’s The Monster at our Door...gives me everything that the news cycle doesn’t: a sense of the interconnected forces and the history that set us up for what we’re experiencing.”—novelist Molly Dektar in Vogue

Award-winning writer, urban theorist, and historian Mike Davis presents an investigation of the looming avian flu pandemic―and an in-depth exploration of how we arrived at the brink of a global health catastrophe.The virus known as H5N1 is now endemic among poultry and wild bird populations in East Asia. A flu strain of astonishing lethality, it has a talent for transforming itself to foil the human immune system―and kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization now warns that avian flu is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious form that could travel at pandemic velocity, killing up to 100 million people within two years.In The Monster at Our Door , the first book to sound this alarm, our foremost urban and environmental critic reconstructs the scientific and political history of this viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles played by burgeoning slums, the agribusiness and fast-food industries, and corrupt governments. Mike Davis tracks the avian flu crisis as the virus moves west and the world remains woefully unprepared to contain it. With drug companies unwilling to invest in essential vaccines, severe shortages persist, a scenario Davis compares to the sinking Titanic : there are virtually no lifesaving resources available to the poor, and precious few for the rich, too.“Brilliant…[Davis’s] chapter explaining the virus’s avidity for mutation is among the finest 10 pages of science journalism you are ever likely to read…[ The Monster at Our Door ] goes on to sketch a history of influenza from the 1918 outbreak to the present, addressing all the complex factors playing into the risk of a pandemic today…Fascinating.”― The New York Times

The author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums attacks the current fashion for empires and white men’s burdens in this blistering collection of radical essays. He skewers contemporary idols such as Mel Gibson, Niall Ferguson, and Howard Dean; unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system; visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the border; predicts ethnic cleansing in New Orleans more than a year before Katrina; recalls the anarchist avengers of the 1890s and “teeny-bopper” riots on the Sunset Strip in the 1960s; discusses the moral bankruptcy of the Democrats in Kansas and West Virginia; remembers “Private Ivan,” who defeated fascism; and looks at the future of capitalism from the top of Hubbert’s Peak.No writer in the United States today brings together analysis and history as comprehensively and elegantly as Mike Davis. In these contemporary, interventionist essays, Davis goes beyond critique to offer real solutions and concrete possibilities for change."Davis remains our penman of lost souls and lost scenarios: He culls nuggets of avarice and depredation the way miners chisel coal."--The Nation“A rare combination of an author, Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in one.”--Susan Faludi, author, Backlash"Davis' work is the cruel and perpetual folly of the ruling elites."--New York TimesMike Davis is the author many books, including City of Quartz, The Ecology of Fear, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in San Diego.

For fourteen million tourists each year, San Diego is the fun place in the sun that never breaks your heart. But America’s eighth-largest city has a dark side. Behind Sea World, the zoo, the Gaslamp District, and the beaches of La Jolla hides a militarized metropolis, boasting the West Coast’s most stratified economy and a tumultuous history of municipal corruption, virulent antiunionism, political repression, and racial injustice. Though its boosters tirelessly propagate an image of a carefree beach town, the real San Diego shares dreams and nightmares with its violent twin, Tijuana.This alternative civic history deconstructs the mythology of “America’s finest city.” Acclaimed urban theorist Mike Davis documents the secret history of the domineering elites who have turned a weak city government into a powerful machine for private wealth. Jim Miller tells the story from the other side: chronicling the history of protest in San Diego from the Wobblies to today’s “globalphobics.” Kelly Mayhew, meanwhile, presents the voice of paradise’s forgotten working people and new immigrants. The texts are vividly enhanced by Fred Lonidier’s photographs.

A DEVASTATING CRITIQUE OF BIBLICAL CHRISTIANITY!The Atheist's Introduction to the New Testament is your one-volume guide to the contradictions and inconsistencies found in Christianity's holy scriptures. It's the only resource you'll need to successfully debate Christian fundamentalists and expose the many weaknesses in the founding documents of the Christian religion. Unlike many contradiction lists available on the internet, The Atheist's Introduction to the New Testament organizes biblical contradictions around each of the major Christian theological doctrines-sin, forgiveness, salvation, the resurrection, the second coming, the divinity of Jesus-to show that they have NO consistent support in the Bible. You'll also learn * the sins of Jesus* Mary, the unclean virgin* how Jesus botched the healing of a blind man* false prophecies about Jesus from the Old Testament, and the name of the REAL messiah. ( It's NOT Jesus!)

While working with a famous scientist in Greenland, four teenage scientists stumble upon a mysterious find that transports them to the Valley of the Runes where they encounter marooned Vikings, Arctic hurricanes, and other dangerous adventures.

With wit and a remarkable grasp of the political marginalization of the 99%, Mike Davis crafts a striking defense of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This pamphlet brilliantly undertakes the most pressing question facing the struggle– what is to be done next? Mike Davis is the author of more than twenty books.

Portrait de la capitale émergente du XXIe siècle, qui mélange à la fois capitalisme sauvage, absolutisme féodal et extravagance urbanistique. Description des conditions de vie et de travail des employés venus de toute l'Asie pour transformer un désert en station touristique pour milliardaires.Suivi de "Questions pour un retour de Dubaï" par François Cusset.

More people are denied SSI and Social Security Disability than are allowed benefits the first time they apply. This includes children and adults. Appeals can take a year or more. In a simplified step by step guide Mike Davis gives disability applicants the crucial information they need to know and exactly what to do to make the best case the first time around. A former SSI and Social Security Disability Claims Examiner, the author has worked on over 4000 cases over a seven-year period. "Too often I have had to deny a claim when I thought there was a genuine disability, but the case was not complete enough to render a favorable decision. What I have tried to do in this book is give the reader the information needed to present his or her case fully, accurately, and in the best possible light. I believe this will increase the chances of a favorable decision dramatically." Here is the inside scoop on what the decision-makers are really looking for and how you can help them to get it.

On a trip to the island of Socotra with Dr. Hasan to examine the local fauna, students Jack, Conor, and Julia befriend a witch, encounter Delta Force commandos, and stumble upon the delivery of a cargo that is powerful enough to destroy the world.

En este iconoclasta folleto, Mike Davis explora la genealogía del cambio climático antropogénico, reconociendo su rastro desde la Grecia antigua hasta la desastrosa sequía de 2007-2010 en Siria. La desecación, la deforestación, el colonialismo europeo y la agricultura extensiva han cambiado profundamente los climas «locales» alterando sus ciclos. No obstante, fue el «descubrimiento», a principios del siglo XX, de una supuesta civilización agonizante en Marte lo que desvió el interés sobre la teoría de la desecación progresiva de los interiores continentales.Propuesta originalmente por el geógrafo anarquista Kropotkin en 1874, su hipótesis decayó durante la década de 1940 debido a la llegada de la meteorología dinámica. Asimismo, la ciencia patológica y su gran confusión entre coincidencia, correlación y causalidad generaron entre los climatólogos «un nuevo consenso disciplinario» que justificaba mirar hacia otro lado.El desierto que viene nos recuerda que el progresivo calentamiento global y la aridificación del interior de Asia, desde finales del siglo XIX, preludian la más que previsible expansión de los desiertos hacia el norte. Después de todo, parece que el antropoceno puede reivindicar a Kropotkin.

Según la ONU, más de mil millones de personas viven en ciudades miseria, en favelas, cerros, chabolas, cantegriles, campamentos y barriadas del Sur global. En este ambicioso y brillante libro, Mike Davis explora el futuro de una desigualdad radical y de una inestabilidad a punto de estallar. Davis retrata la realidad de un vasto y horrendo almacén de seres humanos desterrados de la economía mundial en ciudades pobres hiperdegradadas. Desde la expansión de barriadas en Lima hasta las montañas de basura en Manila, la urbanización de las ciudades miseria se ha separado de la industrialización, e incluso del crecimiento económico. El autor realiza una cuantificación de la aterradora producción en masa de la miseria que caracteriza a las ciudades contemporáneas y argumenta que el crecimiento exponencial de las ciudades miseria no es accidental, sino que es el resultado de una conjunción simultánea de la corrupción de las clases dirigentes, del fracaso institucional y de la acción del FMI y de los Programas de Ajuste Estructural (SAP), dirigidos a transferir la riqueza de pobres a ricos. Azote del sistema neoliberal, Davis desacredita el irresponsable mito de la salvación por uno mismo mostrando exactamente quién es expulsado del «capitalismo autosuficiente». ¿Son estas ciudades marginales, como la aterrorizada clase media victoriana imaginó, terribles volcanes a la espera de entrar en erupción? «Los datos pasmosos recogidos en el libro golpean como verdaderos mazazos… un libro desgarrador.» Financial Times «Si espera usted de este libro un tono apocalíptico –y quién no, ciertamente, pues cómo exponer si no el entuerto en que andamos metidos–, no hay nadie que lo explique mejor.» The Guardian «Una profunda investigación sobre una cuestión apremiante… un libro extraordinario.» Arundhati Roy

This book provides photographers with the foundation to craft more compelling photos from concept all the way through to creation and distribution, on the path to making a living. Based on real-life practice and experience, former National Geographic and White House visual editor, Mike Davis, takes readers on a journey starting with addressing the motivation behind an image and how this determines the rest of the creative process. He goes on to articulate best technical practices to create the narrative through photo composition and what to do with your work after the photos are completed. Each section offers exercises for applied learning and a series of appendices cover assignments structures, a compilation of critical words and concepts, a comprehensive resource guide of organizations, competitions, grants, collectives and agencies, book publishers and printers, and more. This is an ideal resource for students and practitioners alike to gain a more informed understanding of photographic expression and learn how to effectively execute these visions.

Surrealist painter Mike Davis captures mysterious scenes in the style of the Dutch Masters. Davis uses oil paint to create an alternate world where anything is possible, combining arcane personal symbols with social commentary. His vivid, narrative work pulls viewers into dreamscapes where they are soon lost among burning birdhouses, cannon-toting eggs, anthropomorphous insects, and skeletons holding what may be the keys to it all. Will the forlorn subjects who populate his paintings spill their secrets? What happened among the rubble and where are the travelers going? Davis tableaus can reveal important parables to the attentive mind, but only if we study well and learn to read his visual poetry."

Drunk Talk is a one of a kind book with something for everyone and will have you laughing hysterically as you are forced to question what you believe to be true. Included are forty-eight short discussions about different aspects of life with a twist of humor, your drunken fortune, and unique quotes to keep you focused. To those who think they have heard it all, be prepared to be shocked.

Rare book

Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders for President have an important choice to make. It appears Bernie Sanders will not be the Democratic Nominee for President, so who should his supporters vote for? Secretary Hillary Clinton Supporters argue that Sanders supporters must vote for Hillary to stave off the disaster of a Donald Trump Presidency. Is that really a fair characterization? I would argue it is not. From the perspective of a progressive, on issue after issue, more harm will come to America if Hillary is the President than if Donald Trump is. Because of this, this brief text argues that Bernie Sanders supporters should vote for Donald Trump for President.