
City of Quartz
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
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Narrated by:
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Tim Campbell
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By:
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Mike Davis
About this listen
No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To detractors, LA 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 LA'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.
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Story
Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie’s particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It’s through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city’s seasons.
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Disconnected logorrhea
- By Vojtech on 07-07-24
By: DJ Waldie
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Floodpath
- The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles
- By: Jon Wilkman
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Driven by eyewitness accounts and combining urban history with a life-and-death drama and a technological detective story, Floodpath grippingly reanimates the reality behind LA noir fictions like the classic film Chinatown. In an era of climate change, increasing demand on water resources, and a neglected American infrastructure, the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam has never been more relevant.
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Incredible story
- By C. Jackson on 04-07-21
By: Jon Wilkman
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Assembling California
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults.
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Subduction leads to orogeny zones in California
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: John McPhee
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Palo Alto
- A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
- By: Malcolm Harris
- Narrated by: Patrick Harrison
- Length: 28 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory.
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Yes, it's Marxist. it's also good.
- By Alex halladay on 02-15-23
By: Malcolm Harris
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Globalists
- The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
- By: Quinn Slobodian
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, author Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.
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Tracing Neoliberalism to Its European Origins
- By Will Szal on 06-25-19
By: Quinn Slobodian
The metaphor of noir ties in nicely with the felt inexorability of political, social, and geographical upheavals and conflicts given the broader context of forces and relations in motion. Yet, despite this, Davis gives a sense of rebellion even in its most cynical and nihilistic forms as a creative as well as creatively destructive force. The contending classes may end in ruin but not without a fight.
Carefully elaborates LA in historical character
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It covers lots of ground and provides backgrounds of many names I've encountered -- the Chandlers, Hell's Angels, and Kaiser Permanente.
I especially appreciated the essay exploring the history of the archdiocese of Los Angeles with the long tradition of Celtic bishops over a largely Latinx flock.
The reader does make some pronunciation errors which stumble over the authority of the author. Pico Rivera becomes "Riviera" and Los Feliz unhappily becomes "Felix".
Multifaceted history of a city
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good not great
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“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Winston Churchill / George Santayana
A fascinating history of So Cal. land ownership & business.
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Important Urban History Marred by Sneery Narration
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Interesting LA history
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The City of Angels, a History, a Vision & a Dream!
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Great book!
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Fascinating read
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Great Insights to Where BLM Uprisings Come From Institutional Rascism
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