Dead Cities
A Natural History
Mike Davis
Hardcover, $26.95, 1-56584-765-2
6 1/8" x 7 7/8", 288 pages with black-and-white photographs throughout
Current Affairs / Sociology
Territorial sales rights: W
Synopsis
In his most brilliantly syncretic writing yet, radical urban theorist Mike
Davis explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America, a
ceaseless battle waged both within cities and against nature. Using
environmental science as his frame of understanding, Davis examines themes
of urban life today—white flight, deindustrialization, housing and job
segregation and discrimination, and federal policy—and looks at areas he
calls "national sacrifice zones," military landscapes that simulated
warfare and arms production have rendered uninhabitable.
Davis begins our apocalyptically inflected tour with a trip to New York’s
Ground Zero. He then takes us to "German Village," a Utah wasteland that
was once a test site for Allied science advisors to rehearse the perfect
plan for destroying Berlin, and to the diabolic miracle of Las Vegas, where
environmental terrorism is practiced in the name of urban development.
Davis also hits Los Angeles, the frontline of the "Second Civil War"
sparked by American apartheid, and which lies waiting to be ignited in
cities across the country.
With wit, compassion, and an eye for the absurd and the unjust, Mike Davis
has begun a long overdue dialogue on urban science in this prophetic new book.
MacArthur fellow Mike Davis is the author of several books, including City
of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and Magical Urbanism. He lives in San Diego.
Praise for Mike Davis and his work:
"A rare combination of an author, Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in
one."
—Susan Faludi
"Gripping . . . A book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as
great historical interest."
—Amartya Sen, The New York Times Book Review
"The first to extend this powerful mixture of environmental, political and
socioeconomic analysis on a worldwide scale."
—William L. Fox, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.thenewpress.com/newbooks/deadcity.htm
