Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Davis's quirky social history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (LJ 1/91), has become a regional best seller and gained legions of fans across the country. His new work shares many of that book's best traits‘deep and wide-ranging research; an engaging, idiomatic style; and unequivocal opinions about who is to blame for Los Angeles's failings. Blending natural history, geography, political analysis, and a bit of literary analysis, Davis argues that the City of Angels has evolved from promised land to symbol of catastrophe in the popular imagination. Moreover, that symbolism is apt and well deserved given the number of natural laws and social needs its citizens continue to ignore. Individual chapters focus on parks planning, recent earthquake activity, wild animal incursions into the idyllic suburbs, and more. The book's one fault is the diversity of these subjects; it reads more like a collection of essays than a coherent single argument. Still, this highly entertaining study should be required reading for prospective Angelenos and students of urban design; for all academic and public libraries.‘Eric Bryant, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

"I'm not summoning Armageddon," affirms Davis, a social historian and urban theorist whose 1990 NBCC-nominated, dystopian history of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, City of Quartz, is now a cult classic. Maybe so, but the portrait of a city on the brink presented in this powerful, if sometimes scattershot, follow-up volume is sure to remind readers of the Book of Revelations. The book takes Davis in a new direction‘away from the politics of L.A. urban planning, toward geophysical threats to the city, ranging from earthquakes to fires, floods and killer bees. Davis's polemic will raise as many hackles as concerns: while L.A. officials proclaim each earthquake, flood, mud slide and wildfire as an exceptional event, southern California has been actually enjoying a benign climatic and seismic period, and more serious disasters lie ahead, he argues. These natural catastrophes have been compounded by the fact that in building L.A., developers have largely disregarded the region's topography and environment and built in areas prone to such ravages as wildfires and floods. As the population continues to spread into new areas, there will be, predicts the author, an increase in confrontations between the region's wildlife and settlers, a situation rendered more explosive by the widespread poverty and racial problems endemic to the city, and the vast disparities of relief services. As tense as the situation has become, it will worsen as the gap between the have and have-nots widens, he says. The future Davis envisions is credible and alarming, and his argument is bolstered by prose that is machete sharp and accompanied by an archive of stunning photos. Satellite photographs of L.A. during the riots of 1993 resembled those of an erupting volcano, he shows. Which, in Davis's blistering critique, is precisely what it is. Editor, Sara Bershtel (Aug.) FYI: Davis is a 1998 recipient of a McArthur Fellowship grant. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Earthquakes occur along "previously unknown thrust fault[s]." Wildfires ravage ritzy neighborhoods while tenement fires devastate city neighborhoods. Tornadoes appear in a climate supposedly free of the pernicious funnels. All of this takes place in or near L.A. Coincidence or curse? Davis explains that the L.A. area is a rare "Mediterranean littoral" where "high-intensity, low-frequency events (`disasters')" are the usual "agents of landscape and ecological change." (Most of America enjoys temporal environments where ecological change is gradual.) Natural disaster as environmental commonplace contributes to an expectation of the inevitability of natural and human-made disasters in the L.A. Basin. The resulting mind-set legitimizes the view that L.A. is headed for a cosmic as well as geological day of reckoning. Davis, in this deeply referenced (more than 800 footnotes) work, considers the City of Angels' apocalyptic side and its hopes for the future. "No other urban area on the planet so frequently produces large `thermal anomalies'" like the Rodney King riot, which, viewed from a satellite radiometer, registered hot spots "comparable to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo" or the huge Indonesian forest fires of 1997. No sci-fi speculation on society's future, this book is an exploration of how a strange but beautiful climactic oddity has combined with a devolving social climate to create expectations of impending doom. Suffused with much research and pertinent illustration, the work is an exciting source for both ecologically minded fans of L.A.-kulture and disaster devotees--an important if daunting book. Can L.A. be saved? Would we want it to be? Eco-terror at its finest. --Mike Tribby

Kirkus Book Review

A formidable intellectual history of how Los Angeles, the locus of postwar American dreams, became the avatar of national nightmares of physical and social destruction. In this decade, L.A. has witnessed natural phenomena as staggering as those inflicted upon Egypt in the Book of Exodus: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, floods, tornadoes, Malibu fires, even the invasion of ``man-eating'' mountain lions and beach snakes. And like ancient Egypt, L.A. may be reaping the whirlwind for arrogance and social injustice, argues Davis (City of Quartz, not reviewed), an urban theorist who has taught at the Getty Institute and has contributed to the Nation, Sierra magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. In Davis's liberal worldview, the stampede to build edge cities, freeways, and subdivisions paved the way for nature's revenge as surely as mass poverty and racial unrest were the raw materials for the 1992 L.A. riots. In the first three decades of this century, a ``selfish, profit-driven presentism'' ruled southern California, as politicians and developers rejected proposals to preserve parks, beaches, playgrounds and mountain reserves for the community. Davis chillingly details how the vast infrastructure built to service the suburban sprawl was based on a disaster record of only the last 50 years, how ``feedback loops'' in the delicate ecosystem multiply the potential for disaster, and how narrowly L.A. escaped devastation even worse than its well-chronicled catastrophes (e.g., none of the stateŽs last 10 major earthquakes has occurred during school hours). His lucid explanations of scientific phenomena are mixed with spiky observations (e.g., on how southern California's Mediterranean climate differs from the tranquil paradise proclaimed by early civic boosters: ``It is Walden Pond on acid,'' he notes). Davis concludes this disturbing history by analyzing racist dystopian fantasies set in L.A. (including The Turner Diaries) and how high-tech trends may cater to affluent Angelenos' mania for security. A dazzling mix of environmental studies, urban history, and cultural criticism.