This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies (New Yorker).

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, Los Angeles brings it all together. To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where you can rot without feeling it. To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs L.A.'s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West--a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city's current status.

A witty and engrossing look at Los Angeles' urban ecology and the city's place in America's cultural fantasies

Earthquakes. Wildfires. Floods. Drought. Tornadoes. Snakes in the sea, mountain lions, and a plague of bees. In this controversial tour de force of scholarship, unsparing vision, and inspired writing, Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz, revisits Los Angeles as a Book of the Apocalypse theme park. By brilliantly juxtaposing L.A.'s fragile natural ecology with its disastrous environmental and social history, he compellingly shows a city deliberately put in harm's way by land developers, builders, and politicians, even as the incalculable toll of inevitable future catastrophe continues to accumulate.

Counterpointing L.A.'s central role in America's fantasy life--the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909--with its wanton denial of its own real history, Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility.

Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease at the millennial end of the American century.

With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.

A brilliant and comprehensive study of class struggle in the United States

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.

For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital-and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises-was always a central part of his urban geography.
In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters-natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make-that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas's penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city.
Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.

This global environmental and political history will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project (Observer).

. . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching. --The Independent

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th 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.

Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.

Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

The profound . . . brilliant account of the rise of the world's slums and the failures of modern urbanization--by the world's leading urbanist (Arundhati Roy, activist and Booker Prize-winning author)

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, and even from 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 unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams Award

Is 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 America

This 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.

The brilliant and disturbing 100-year history of modern terrorism and car bombs--the ubiquitous weapon of urban mass destruction

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 provocative history, Mike Davis traces the 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.

Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene?

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working blue collar jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist without peer.

Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis's book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth and exploring Davis's thinking on history, labor, capitalism, and revolution - themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. This will be his first book on Marxism itself.

In a time of ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites, explores the question of revolutionary agency--what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order?--and the situation of the world's working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in classical socialist thought, such as clarifying proletarian agency, before turning to the urgent questions of our time: global warming, the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt, and the city's demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the end of history?

California and the Western States are rich in abundant and diverse species of mushrooms. Amateur mushroom collectors and mycologists alike will find over 300 species of the region's most common, distinctive, and ecologically important mushrooms profiled in this comprehensive field guide. It provides the most up-to-date science on the role of fungi in the natural world, methods to identify species, and locations of mushroom habitats. With excellent color illustrations showing top and side views of mushrooms of the Western States and a user-friendly text, it is informative but still light enough to be carried into the woods. When used to identify mushrooms, keys bring the reader to individual species, with a descriptive text providing cues for identifying additional species. Mushrooms common in urban landscapes are included, which is especially useful for the casual encounter with backyard fungi. The guide also provides a table of both old and new species names, and information on edibility and look-alikes, both dangerous and benign.

A section on mushroom arts and crafts features mushroom photography, painting, philately, spore prints, dyes, and cultivation. The guide also offers a comprehensive list of resources including national field guides, general mushroom books and periodicals, club and society contact information, and web sites.



- Primary descriptions and illustrations of 300 species of mushrooms plus text descriptions of many more.

- Latest word in mushroom taxonomy and nomenclature. Clear discussion of DNA sequencing and new classifications.

- Especially good coverage of southern California and Southwestern mushrooms often neglected in other field guides.

A fresh take on cosmic horror...

A Victorian Englishman summons a strange puppet-like being to an old Colonial Inn. A doctor returns from the Great War and discovers a mysterious naked woman at the edge of the Atlantic.

A contemporary collector of arcane books retraces the steps of these other men -- adventurers who sought out the mysteries of neighboring dimensions.

In THE SEA OF ASH, Scott Thomas takes us along as three men from three different centuries experience the wonders and horrors of an unknown New England.

Never had the universe felt so vast, and I so small within it. I had, through circumstance, been made aware of something, but of what? Something either too horrible or too beautiful for humans to know. -From The Sea of Ash

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.

Evil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places--alternate realities being constructed as utopias in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation. These developments--in cities, deserts, and in the middle of the sea--are worlds where consumption and inequality surpass our worst nightmares.

Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as The World is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords--in many ways textbook capitalists--are redefining conspicuous consumption in fortified palaces. In Hong Kong, Cairo, and even the Iranian desert, burgeoning communities of nouveaux riches have taken shelter in fantasy Californias, complete with Mickey Mouse statues, while their maids sleep in rooftop chicken coops. Meanwhile, Ted Turner rides herd over his bison in 2 million acres of private parkland.

Davis and Monk have assembled an extraordinary group of urbanists, architects, historians, and visionary thinkers to reflect upon the trajectory of a civilization whose deepest ethos seems to be to consume all the resources of the earth within a single lifetime.

A new edition of a classic book on viral catastrophes--the Spanish flu, the Avian flu, and now, Covid-19

In his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis explains how the problems he warned of remain, and he sets the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of previous disastrous outbreaks, 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.

In language both accessible and authoritative, 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.

Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene?

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.

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 Times

Mike 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.

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 Ronal Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Mike Davis delivers a brilliant defense of the Occupy movement and offers pragmatic advice to the 99%.

For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital-and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises-was always a central part of his urban geography.
In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters-natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make-that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas's penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city.
Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.