City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

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...