CITY OF QUARTZ: Excavating the Future in...

CITY OF QUARTZ: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis, with photographs by Robert Morrow (Vintage: $14.). In this often devastating socio-economic history, Mike Davis argues that Los Angeles “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.” The same city has become the symbol of the future everyone desires and the future that doesn’t work. Any number of books have recounted the fads and frauds of Southern California’s colorful past, but Davis offers a ferociously left-wing interpretation of these developments, stressing the role of power, money and the conflict between various groups of haves and have-nots. In addition to the familiar stories of the development of the San Fernando Valley and the widening gap between the rich and poor, he comments on such diverse phenomena as the rise and fall of Kaiser Steel, Cardinal Mahoney’s opposition to the attempts to unionize the gravediggers in Catholic cemeteries and the popularity of fortress-like architecture during the ‘80s. Davis has a weakness for the melodramatic turn of phrase, and some passages seem to have been written with a thesaurus at his side. But despite these flaws, “City of Quartz” stands as a fascinating and appalling account of the development of an increasingly bizarre city.