[WSMDiscuss] (Fwd) Hamba kahle Mike Davis - first of many tributes

Patrick Bond pbond at mail.ngo.za
Wed Oct 26 18:13:06 CEST 2022


Mike Davis (scholar).jpg 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mike_Davis_(scholar).jpg>https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-obituary/

*Mike Davis: 1946–2022*

*A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a historian’s 
memory.*

*By Jon Wiener <https://www.thenation.com/authors/jon-wiener/>*


Mike Davis, author and activist, radical hero and family man, died 
October 25 after a long struggle with esophageal cancer; he was 76. He’s 
best known for his 1990 book about Los Angeles, /City of Quartz/. 
Marshall Berman, reviewing it for /The Nation/, said 
<https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=e684e288-1cd4-41bd-8238-8dea8b6fbf73%40redis> 
it combined “the radical citizen who wants to grasp the totality of his 
city’s life, and the urban guerrilla aching to see the whole damned 
thing blow.”

And the whole thing did blow, two years after the book was published. 
When the Rodney King riots broke out in LA in 1992, frightened white 
people rushed home, locked the doors, and turned on the TV news. Mike, 
however, was driving in the opposite direction, with his old friend Ron 
Schneck at his side. They parked, got out, and started talking with the 
people in the streets about what was going on. Then he went home and 
wrote about it.

Mike was a 1960s person, but he didn’t come from a liberal or left 
background. His father was a meat cutter and a conservative, and as a 
young patriot, Mike briefly joined the Devil Pups 
<https://thelandmag.com/the-land-interview-mike-davis-jeff-weiss/>—the 
Marine Corps’ version of the Boy Scouts. His life was changed by the 
civil rights movement. In 1962, when he was a junior in high school, a 
Black activist married to his cousin took Mike to a protest organized by 
the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), picketing an all-white Bank of 
America branch in San Diego. Soon he was volunteering in the CORE office 
there. He started college at Reed, but left to go to work for SDS.

As an SDS organizer in the late ‘60s, Mike was part of the largest mass 
arrest in the history of 1960s protest—at “Valley State,” now California 
State University–Northridge, in 1969, when 286 were arrested after a 
peaceful sit-down of 3,000 students protesting the school administration 
banning all demonstrations, rallies, and meetings. “What I remember most 
vividly about the arrests,” he said 45 years later, “was the ride to 
jail in a police bus. The girls started singing, ‘Hey Jude, don’t be 
afraid.’ I fell in love with all of them.”

/City of Quartz/was his masterpiece. Published in 1990, it opens with a 
description of a visit to the ruins of the socialist city of Llano del 
Rio, founded in 1914 in the desert north of LA. There, on May Day 1990, 
he finds two twentysomething building laborers from El Salvador camped 
out, hoping for work in nearby Palmdale. “When I observed that they were 
settled in the ruins of a /ciudad socialista/, one of them asked whether 
the ‘rich people had come with planes and bombed them out.’” They asked 
what he was doing out there, and what he thought of Los Angeles. “I 
tried to explain that I had just written a book…” And then you turn the 
page, to chapter one, the unforgettable “Sunshine and Noir.”

After /City of Quartz/, everybody wanted Mike. Adam Shatz wrote in 1997 
<http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9709/davis.html> about how

phoning Mike Davis is a good way of getting acquainted with his 
answering machine.… Sitting on his porch on a warm evening, I understood 
why: The phone rang incessantly, and Davis never once rose from his 
chair. The calls last from morning to midnight. It might be the 
photographer Richard Avedon or the architect I.M. Pei with a request for 
one of Davis’s legendary tours of L.A.… It might also be a Danish 
curator mounting an exhibit on the postmodern city, an organizer with 
the hotel workers’ union, a student at UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Center, or 
(very likely) a Hollywood screenwriter.

Mike Davis. 
<https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/mikedavis-img.jpg>He 
turned down most invitations to speak. I remember his daughter Roisin 
telling him in 2014, “Dad, you really should reply to that invitation 
from the president of Argentina,” and Mike saying, “If I’m not replying 
to the pope, I’m not replying to her.” (He had been invited to the 
Vatican 
<https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-07-25/mike-davis-reflects-on-life-activism-climate-change-bernie-sanders-aoc-los-angeles-politics> 
after the publication of /Planet of Slums/.)

But he accepted some. At UC Irvine, where we were colleagues in the 
history department for most of a decade, I gave a lecture in his course 
(“Intro to 20th-Century US History”) to cover for him the day he was 
speaking at an anarchist convention in Palermo.

Mike hated being called “a prophet of doom.” Yes, LA did explode two 
years after /City of Quartz/; the fires and floods did get more intense 
after /Ecology of Fear/, and of course a global pandemic did follow /The 
Monster at Our Door/. But when he wrote about climate change or viral 
pandemics, he was not offering a “prophecy”; he was reporting on the 
latest research. After Covid hit, we did several /Nation/ podcast 
segments about it; he told me at one point “I’ve been staying up late 
reading virology textbooks.”

He said he wrote about the things that scared him the most. /Ecology of 
Fear/ (1998) dealt with earthquakes, forest fires, floods and 
century-long droughts. One chapter, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” 
became a classic, arguing that fire budgets would be better spent 
protecting crowded inner-city neighborhoods rather than mega-mansions 
built in remote hillside fire areas. That provoked its own firestorm. 
His critics, led by a Malibu realtor, couldn’t refute his argument, so 
they went after his footnotes—and both the /Los Angeles Times/ and /The 
New York Times/ ran stories 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/la-story-backlash-boosters/> 
about the “controversy.” But the controversy faded and the argument 
became stronger. “During fire season,” /LA Times/ columnist Gustavo 
Arellano wrote in 2018 
<https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-malibu-burn-20181114-story.html>, 
when fires circled LA and the sky was full of smoke for weeks, “I always 
think about…’The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.’”

Unlike the rest of the New Left, Mike didn’t reject the old left—his 
mentor in the 1960s and ‘70s was the renegade CP leader in Southern 
California, Dorothy Healey. Mike loved arguing with her. When Dorothy 
died in 2006, Mike wrote in /The Nation/ 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/dorothy-healey-0/> that she 
represented “the left’s ‘greatest generation’—those tough-as-nails 
children of Ellis Island who built the CIO, fought Jim Crow in Manhattan 
and Alabama, and buried their friends in the Spanish earth.” Their 
deaths, he said, were “an inestimable, heart-wrenching loss.” Now we 
feel the same about his.

Mike Davis: 1946–2022 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-obituary/>

Mike Davis’s Forecast for the Left 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-old-gods-set-night/>

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of /The Nation/ and co-author (with 
Mike Davis) of /Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties/.

***

*MORE FROM Mike Davis <https://www.thenation.com/authors/mike-davis/> *

*_Create a Coronavirus Commission With Sharp 
Teeth<https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/congress-covid-commission-biden/>_*

December 7, 2020

*_California’s Desert Ecosystems Will Never 
Recover<https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/california-fire-drought-climate/>_*

September 16, 2020

*_Anthony Fauci: The Last American 
Hero?<https://www.thenation.com/article/society/fauci-american-hero-coronavirus/>_*

July 7, 2020

Author page <https://www.thenation.com/authors/mike-davis/>

***

**
**


      ***Mike Davis on Death, Organizing, Politics, Climate Change ***

**


      **
      *Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller. *

August 2, 2022 Sam Dean Los Angeles Times 
<https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-07-25/mike-davis-reflects-on-life-activism-climate-change-bernie-sanders-aoc-los-angeles-politics?> 


In late June, I wrote to Mike Davis to see if he’d be up for an interview.

His reply: “If you don’t mind the long trek to SD, I’d be happy to talk. 
I’m in the terminal stage of metastatic esophageal cancer but still up 
and around the house.”

Davis does not mince words. Still, he can tell some stories. Like this 
one: Born in Fontana, raised in El Cajon, he spent the ’60s on the front 
lines of radical political movements in Los Angeles, where he joined the 
Communist Party alongside Angela Davis. In solidarity, he gave her a car 
— a cherry of a ’54 Chevy. A month later, at a Party meeting, he asked 
how she liked it, only to hear that the battery had supposedly blown up, 
and a “kind” mechanic had agreed to take it off her hands for free.

Or this: In 1970, he marched on wildcat Teamster picket lines alongside 
union brothers with sawed-off shotguns under their trenchcoats in the 
summer sun. Then there was the time he fled the phalanx of sheriffs that 
descended on Belvedere Park during the Chicano Moratorium.

But the story that put Davis on the cultural map, laid out in his 1990 
bestseller “City of Quartz,” is the story of Los Angeles. The book, 
required reading for anyone who wants to understand the city, detailed a 
history of L.A. as a corrupt machine built to enrich its elite while the 
white supremacist LAPD served as attack dogs to beat, jail and kill 
troublemakers. It also warned another conflagration, Watts 2.0, could be 
on the horizon. Eighteen months later, in April ’92, the city exploded. 
Davis looked like a seer, though he said the simmering rage was obvious 
to anyone who got out of their car. He became a minor celebrity. He also 
started working alongside the leaders of the gang truce to advocate for 
reinvestment in South L.A.

An astonishing run of more than a dozen books followed, oscillating 
between critiques and histories of the American West and sweeping 
historical analyses of how climate disaster, capitalism and colonialism 
have ground the global poor between their gears and set us up for future 
calamity (including global viral pandemics, predicted in 2005’s “The 
Monster at Our Door”). Recently, he returned to L.A. as a subject with 
2020’s “Set the Night on Fire,” an encyclopedic history of L.A. in the 
’60s told through social movements.

In person, Davis, 76, is very funny, unfailingly generous and seems, 
above all, to love people. His home is stuffed with books (he reads “500 
pages a day”), pet reptiles and a collection of leftist art and 
artifacts shared with his wife, artist and professor Alessandra 
Moctezuma. Our conversation lasted from midday until sunset. Davis 
regaled me with stories of unfinished projects and outlaws he’d known, 
dangerous students (arsonists, stalkers) and endangering students (a 
Fijian prince was stabbed during a class assignment to “hang out in L.A. 
at night” but thanked him for it), and what he considers his true 
passions — the dying ecology of California and igneous rocks, which he’s 
traveled the world to collect and store in his converted-garage office.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

*Sam Dean: *You’ve decided to stop chemo treatments for your esophageal 
cancer. What are you thinking about, day to day?

*Mike Davis: *First of all, I have plenty of distractions. I read maybe 
500 pages a day — military history, exploration — and in the evenings I 
cuddle with my kids and we watch some crime show.

I’m a fatalistic Celt, and I have the example of my mother and older 
sister, who died like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad. I intend to not 
let [my family] down, to be just as solid as they were. I’m not 
depressed. The major thing in dying that I was worried about — my father 
had an especially agonizing death, the trauma of it’s never quite left 
me — was the thought that it might be so traumatic for my kids that 
that’s what they remember of me. But thanks to [California’s] 
aid-in-dying law, I have control over the final act.

But I guess what I think about the most is that I’m just extraordinarily 
furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a 
barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — you know, fighting.

*SD: *You were slapped with the label “prophet of doom” after “City of 
Quartz” came out in 1992 — in which you did seem to anticipate the ’92 
uprisings in response to the Rodney King verdict. But you’ve described 
yourself as a “neo-catastrophist,” in the more narrow sense of believing 
that history, from geological history to human political history, 
happens more in violent leaps like earthquakes and meteor impacts and 
revolutions than in gradual shifts. Do you still think of yourself as a 
catastrophist today?

*MD: *Yes. But I mean catastrophist in two ways. One, in resonance with 
Walter Benjamin, is the belief in the sudden appearance of opportunities 
to take leaps into an almost utopian future. But of course, 
catastrophist in the other sense too, of, you know, events like plagues. 
Now, in my fading days, I sit here with wonderment and read the paper, 
and people are saying you gotta have more coal, gotta have more oil, a 
year after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report made 
clear 
<https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-04-04/world-hurtling-to-climate-danger-zone> 
that we are without question entering at least a 3-degree-Celsius world. 
Which is almost unimaginable. And what I’ve tried to write about 
<https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii61/articles/mike-davis-who-will-build-the-ark> 
and convince people of is that this is an already anticipated genocide. 
A large minority, the poorest people on the planet, are in a sense doomed.

And as for the old thing of, well, flying saucers will land and humanity 
joins in a common cause — look at the bodies piling up on borders and 
the walls being built. Environmental refugees will simply die.

*SD: *Your most recent book, “Set the Night on Fire,” covered the 
movement history of L.A. in the ’60s — and how the LAPD and Sheriff’s 
Department, along with the FBI, brutally suppressed activist groups.

*MD: *The LAPD in my mind is unreformable. But the Sheriff’s Department 
is absolutely frightening. They’ve always been, to some extent: I was in 
the Chicano Moratorium and Belvedere Park, in all the big Eastside 
demonstrations in the ’70s, when the sheriffs would just come in 
shooting. But they’ve never been so wildly and completely out of control 
as they are now.

The problem is the culture and the cadre. The older sheriffs, like many 
of the older [LAPD], are simply unreformable. The real solution is just 
fire them en masse, take over the academies, break up the gangs and, 
very importantly, require people to live in the areas they patrol, or at 
least within city limits. There’s no way that you’re going to have an 
acceptable Police or Sheriff’s Department in a city so full of class and 
economic contradictions as Los Angeles. That’s not a reason not to 
reform, but it’s a reason to be realistic about the limits of it.

*SD: *You’ve spent much of your life on the front lines of struggles for 
social justice and political change, from CORE [the Congress of Racial 
Equality] and SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] early in your life 
to labor activism and international solidarity movements in later years. 
The act of organizing seems to rest on hope for changing the world, but 
your books paint a grim picture: ecological collapse, political 
corruption, white supremacy, the continuing immiseration of the global 
poor. How do you hold on to hope?

*MD: *To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. 
And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, 
I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always wants to 
know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not 
a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly and realistically 
as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a city decaying from the 
bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so important to me as a 
Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see fascism. I’m writing 
because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or 
good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and 
fight even when the fight seems hopeless.

*SD: *In interviews in 2020, you did express some optimism about the 
energy you saw in the streets during the Black Lives Matter protests. 
Two years on, where have you seen that energy go?

*MD: *I’m old enough to say with some authority that this generation is 
different from any other postwar generation. The combination of seeing 
rights stripped away on one side and facing declining economic ability 
on the other has radicalized them and has given struggles over what some 
people denounce as identity politics a very material force.

Kids are looking at their future. Before I retired from teaching at [UC] 
Riverside, I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with kids who 
were just agonized. They’re the first to go to college in their family, 
and suddenly their parents lose their jobs and they don’t know where to 
turn because there’s so many expectations and so many sacrifices been 
made to get them into university that this will somehow pan out into a 
real future. And that wasn’t happening.

But the biggest single political problem in the United States right now 
has been the demoralization of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of 
thousands of young activists. Part of the problem is the lack of 
organizational structure, particularly of organizations of organizers. 
There’s no leadership to give direction.

I mean, I’m a supporter of Bernie Sanders, but the Sanders campaign held 
up this idea that we use movements to build electoral politics and 
electoral politics to build movements. If you look at the history of 
popular movements in relationship to electoral politics, that’s hardly 
ever been true. I mean, Bernie and AOC and so on, they’re on every 
picket line and they’re always for the right thing, but they’ve allowed 
the movement in the streets to dissipate, and kids or young people are 
so demoralized.

*SD: *What could be happening instead?

*MD: *Why is it that the right, the extreme right, owns the streets and 
not the left? It’s not like Europe, where in a lot of countries youth 
activism is quiescent or on decline. There are millions of people like 
[my 18-year-old son], but who’s telling him where to go to fight or what 
to do?

Who’s inviting him to the meeting? All they get instead, and what I get 
every day, are 10 solicitations from Democrats to support candidates. I 
vote for those candidates. I think they should be supported, but the 
movement’s more important. And we’ve forgotten the use of disciplined, 
aggressive but nonviolent civil disobedience. Take climate change. We 
should be sitting in at the headquarters of every oil company every day 
of the week. You could easily put together a national campaign. You have 
tons of people who are willing to get arrested, who are so up to do it. 
Nobody’s organizing that.

    The biggest single political problem in the United States right now
    has been the demoralization of tens of thousands, probably hundreds
    of thousands of young activists.

— urban theorist, scholar, activist and historian Mike Davis

*SD: *You say aggressive, nonviolent civil disobedience is necessary. 
But what about political violence? You wrote a book about the history of 
the car bomb, “Buda’s Wagon.” You also lived through both L.A. 
uprisings, you were a Friend of the Panthers, you lived in Belfast 
during the Troubles. Are you ever surprised there isn’t more political 
violence happening in the U.S.?

*MD: *I remember at the height of the scare about the Black Panthers, I 
would tell people: What is so remarkable is there’s so little 
Black-on-white violence in American history compared to the relentless 
white violence against people of color.

But we’ve not seen the kind of violence that’s coming from the right, 
nor have we seen — because we haven’t been dangerous enough recently — 
what will happen when all the new repressive powers of surveillance, all 
the antiterrorist legislation, comes down on progressive movements. The 
Democrats’ reaction to the war on terror, on most crime bills, has been 
to reform a little bit at the edges but never attempt to dismantle it.

*SD: *You recently wrote about 
<https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/217> the megalomania behind 
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and concluded by saying, “Never has so much 
fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands. 
It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich 
Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.” All 
were assassins or attempted assassins, right?

*MD: *Did you look up that last name? He killed [Symon Petliura,] the 
great hero of the Ukrainian independence movement. He shot him on a 
Paris street, and a Paris jury found him innocent once they heard the 
story of the pogroms and so on. Kind of like the Angela Davis jury 
<https://documents.latimes.com/angela-davis-not-guilty-jury-finds/>. 
Great character.

One of the major book projects that I never finished, though have been 
interviewed about it and was published as a separate book in French, was 
a project called “Heroes of Hell,” looking at violent revolution in the 
19th and early 20th century. Bolsheviks were always opposed to 
individual acts of violence, because Russia had so much experience with 
that before the revolution — the Leninist argument was that you’re 
substituting the heroic deed for mass action, the heroic sacrificial 
individual for the class. It made a lot of sense.

To me political violence is something to be judged much more rationally 
than morally. And there are instances: After the death of Franco, the 
Francoist transition to preserve the regime had all been set in place. 
[Luis] Carrero Blanco was the anointed successor to Franco, and a group 
blew his car over a cathedral. It totally disrupted the succession, and 
made relative democratization possible. We know on the negative side 
that if Fanny Kaplan hadn’t shot Lenin, Stalin might not have happened. 
To me it’s an open question depending on context and conditions.

I, by the way, never supported the Weathermen. In fact, I profoundly 
hate the Weather People. Those people did exactly what cops would’ve 
done, and now they’ve reinvented history to make themselves heroes. To 
me, they’re just rich kids, along with some ordinary kids, playing 
“Zabriskie Point” for themselves.

*SD: *You didn’t decide to go to college until you were nearly 30, and 
your first book, “Prisoners of the American Dream,” came out when you 
were 40. Had you always wanted to write?

*MD: *No, learning to write is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. 
It involved sometimes a whole ream of paper on an electric typewriter 
just to get the first sentence. It was absolutely brutal.

*SD: *So why did you want to do it?

*MD: *Because I was such a miserable failure as an organizer and 
speaker. The first speech I ever gave was an antiwar rally in Stanford, 
1965. I was working on this crazy SDS project in Oakland. I succeeded in 
driving away three-quarters of the crowd within about five minutes. I’ve 
spent years in tiny little groups trying to regroup with even smaller 
groups, going to every demonstration, trying this and that. And writing 
became the one skill that was useful for political activity, for the 
movement.

*D: *Who influenced your writing the most? What were you reading that 
made you want to write?

*MD: *I’ve never read much fiction, so the fiction I did read had a lot 
of influence, starting with “The Grapes of Wrath.” The kind of biblical 
cadence and language of Steinbeck. Then the New Left Review was an early 
influence on my writing, and in some ways a bad one.

One of my most profound literary and intellectual influences was the 
Welsh Marxist named Gwyn Williams. He had come out of the communist 
historians group, [had] been the first to write an article in English on 
Gramsci, but above all had this command of Welsh history on so many 
different levels. So to some extent I wanted L.A. to be…

*SD: *Your Wales?

*MD: *Yeah! And then of course, in natural history the great influence 
of mine was my friend Steve Pyne. He’s the fire historian, and just a 
great all-around character. He was a firefighter and went to Stanford on 
a baseball scholarship. I picked up his book when I was very homesick in 
London and read his social history of fire in America. And suddenly I 
wanted to write the environmental history of L.A. as political and 
social history.

But the real core of my writing was storytelling. I told one of my 
colleagues at Riverside, I’m not a writer’s writer at all, but I am a 
damn good storyteller. And I have been around some of the best 
storytellers on the planet. You know, in Belfast pubs and logger bars in 
Butte, Montana, I’ve heard magnificent stories.

*SD: *What are some of the most surprising reactions you’ve seen to your 
work?

*MD: *After “City of Quartz” came out, I became close friends with Kevin 
Starr. We were set to debate. /[The L.A. Times described Starr and Davis 
as “Dueling Prophets of Next L.A. 
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-19-mn-64521-story.html>” 
in 1994; Starr published a rosier L.A. history book at the same time as 
Davis’.] /He was so charming and nice that I started seeing him for 
meals with his wife, and he was a regular attendee of Bohemian Grove. So 
he invited me to Bohemian Grove.

*SD: *Really?

*MD: *I said, “What? They’d never let me in Bohemian Grove in a million 
years!” He said, “Oh yes, they will. The only problem is you can’t film 
or record or ever write about it.” And so I said: “Too bad.” Friends of 
mine were angry at me. Everybody wanted me to go to Bohemian Grove. But 
all that happens at Bohemian Grove is that George Shultz and a bunch of 
billionaires run around peeing on redwood trees acting like 7-year-olds.

I’ve turned down other invitations that really aggravated my friends. I 
got an invitation to the Vatican.

*SD: *Who invited you to the Vatican?

*MD: *The office of Francis. Based on “Planet of Slums.” And I decided 
not to do that.

*SD: *Before we wrap up, are there any, I don’t know, exhortations, 
calls to action, that you want to share?

*MD: *Uh, no. I’ve resisted various things, one of which is the writerly 
idea that you have to write something profound about your termination. I 
have no intention of doing that, nor any compulsion to write some 
mock-heroic thing. When my older sister died, I became certain I was 
gonna die too. Though I didn’t know it would be of the same cancer that 
she had. And I wrote two poems that pretty much sum up my view of life, 
just straightforward poems. I’ll leave those behind.

I think people who read my stuff pretty much get it. One of the reasons 
this “aid in dying” is important to me is that it also ensures I won’t 
lose my sense of humor. But what my older sister taught me when she got 
the final verdict — and she was just as straightforward and brave as she 
was in everything else in her life — was that it’s an opportunity to 
teach your children not to be afraid of this. To be sad but not fear it.

I’m just an ordinary person going through what every ordinary person 
eventually goes through under circumstances that aren’t especially 
tragic at all. Except maybe for some of the family.

But no need to make, you know, ponderous statements. It’s been more fun 
just watching Golden State play or Scandinavian mysteries or reading 
books, above all relaxing and hanging out with the family. I’m so lucky 
to be cocooned in all the love I have here.

Sam Dean is a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering the 
technology industry in Southern California. He has previously worked as 
a feature writer for a number of publications including Newsweek, the 
Verge, 538 and Lucky Peach.

***


    Mike Davis

A History of the Car Bomb 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c584176c3a0ed90b970200>

A startling analysis of the way significant parts of our planet have 
been rapidly urbanizing and de-industrializing. +

Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/616684349ff37c5d312e81cf>

With wit and a remarkable grasp of the political marginalization of the 
99%, Mike Davis crafts a striking defense of the Occupy Wall Street 
movement. This pamphlet brilliantly undertakes the most pressing 
question facing the struggle– what is to be done next? +

Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control The Ecology of Fear 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5a06a73e9ff37c246c09f917>

Every American city has its official insignia and slogan, some have 
municipal mascots, colors, songs, birds, trees, even rocks. But Los 
Angeles alone has adopted an official Nightmare. Mike Davis, author of 
Prisoners of the American Dream and City of Quartz: Excavating the 
Future in LA (1990) shows how this nightmare is slowly becoming real. +

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5d54b4229ff37c5bca622bd0>

The brilliant and disturbing 100-year history of the “poor man’s air 
force,” the ubiquitous weapon of urban mass destruction On a September 
day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a 
horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s 
Wall Street, killing 40 people. +

Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a 
Time of Tumult <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/524b5404307888ec64000019>

This collection of interviews includes conversations with sixteen of the 
most noted thinkers & political economists on the Left, including Noam 
Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Mike Davis, David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Sam 
Gindin, Leo Panitch and Doug Henwood. (epub - pdf) +

Catalyst Journal Volume 1, Issue 01 Spring 2017 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5a65265d9ff37c179d09f92e>

Catalyst Journal: A Theory of Journal & Strategy is published quarterly 
by Jacobin Foundation +

Catalyst Journal Volume 1, Issue 02 Summer 2017 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5a652b4d9ff37c3c2c09f933>

Catalyst Journal: A Theory of Journal & Strategy is published quarterly 
by Jacobin Foundation +

Cities and Society <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090c420c00>

essays +

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090cb00c00>

(book) Mike Davis - City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles +

Class: The Anthology <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5b01da7d9ff37c7e10622bce>

Using an innovative framework, this reader examines the most important 
and influential writings on modern class relations. +

Dark Raptures: A Consumers’ Guide to the Destruction of Los Angeles 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c584186c3a0ed90b9d0e00>

(essay) Mike Davis - Dark Raptures: A Consumers’ Guide to the 
Destruction of Los Angeles +

Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5653ed1c9ff37c05d8fd49d6>

An uneven collection but with some amazing case studies of neoliberal 
geographies, including Ted Turner’s land holdings larger than Delaware 
and Rhode Island combined, Dubai as Milton Friedman’s beach club, etc. +

Fear and Money in Dubai 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/54f034bf334fe00ccdaf2be6>

 From the series “Metropollitan Disorders” +

Green Versus Gold: Sources In California’s Environmental History 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5bafc2a09ff37c5da8622c19>

While the state of California remains one of the most striking and 
varied landscapes in the world, it has experienced monumental changes 
since European settlers first set foot there. The past two centuries 
have witnessed an ongoing struggle between environment and economy, 
nature and humanity that has left an indelible mark on the region. Green 
Versus Gold provides a compelling look at California’s environmental 
history from its Native American past to conflicts and movements of 
recent decades... +

Homeowners and Homeboys: Urban Restructuring in LA 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5c19a0ae9ff37c046f622bc4>

Enclitic Volume 11, Number 3 (1989): pp. 8-16. +

How Eden Lost Its Garden 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c584186c3a0ed90b9c0e00>

(essay) Mike Davis - How Eden Lost Its Garden +

In the Shade of the Common: Towards a Culture of Open Networks 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5a4d77369ff37c55fc09f928>

Numerous articles. +

Jacobin Issue 37 Spring 2020: Pandemic Politics 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/62b3c6509ff37c63d32e81c9>

https://jacobin.com/issue/pandemic-politics +

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third 
World <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c58cf66c3a0edb0b070d00>

“Eloquent and passionate, this is a veritable Black Book of liberal 
capitalism.”—Tariq Ali +

Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090c050900>

In this illuminating and concise collection of readings, Karl Marx 
emerges as the first theorist to give a comprehensive social view of the 
birth and development of capitalist modernity that began with the Second 
Industrial Revolution and still exists today. +

Mike Davis Essay Collection 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c584186c3a0ed90b9e0e00>

Mike Davis Essay Collection - 42 Essays in PDF +

Mike Davis’ Interview to Occupied London 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090c850500>

Mike Davis interview to Occupied London +

New Left Review 069-150 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c58bfe6c3a0eda0b6e7800>

Courtesy of genevaheaton. +

New Left Review, Second Series 097 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5728bea09ff37c05db61df28>

The 97th issue of The New Left Review’s second series (January-February 
2016) +

Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5b3c1c789ff37c7855622bea>

2018, Verso Books “Is revolution possible in the age of the 
Anthropocene?” +

Old Gods, New Enigmas: Notes on Historical Agency 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/59e4a7fb9ff37c4647008e49>

https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no2/historical-agency-davis +

Planet of Slums <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090cb10c00>

According to the UN, more than one billion people now live in the slums 
of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike 
Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively 
unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the 
garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from 
industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast 
humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world 
economy... +

Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of 
the US Working Class <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090cb20c00>

This is Davis’s exegesis of why has the world’s most industrially 
advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This 
series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois 
democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the 
New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some 
bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United 
States. +

Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and 
Control: An Interview with Mike Davis 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c584176c3a0ed90b640500>

Interview with Mike Davis by London-based anarchist journal Occupied 
London +

Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Issue Collection 1: Volume 1, Issue 1 to 
Volume 10, Issue 5/6 <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c58dd26c3a0ec111ae1000>

Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Issue Collection 1: Volume 1, Issue 1 to 
Volume 10, Issue 5/6 [Journal on World-Systems Analysis] +

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5ec7ea639ff37c38392e81d2>

A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties +

Taking the Tempurature of History: Le Roy Ladurie’s Adventures in the 
Little Ice Age <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5b34863b9ff37c505f622bda>

New Left Review 110 Mar/Apr 2018 pp. 85-129. (Debating Green Strategy—2) +

The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090c0b1200>

“The Bending Cross offers us an old-fashioned—and, yes, incorrigibly 
romantic—ethos for activism; an antidote to jaded postmodernist 
cynicism, made compelling and coherent by the example of Debs’s own 
life. It is ironic that the Socialist leader was imprisoned for 
‘disloyalty,’ since what most distinguished Debs was his moral 
steadfastness and unbreakable loyalty to the labor movement.” — Mike 
Davis, from the Introduction +

The City Reader (Sixth Edition) 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5ce3f5fc9ff37c704a622bc9>

2015, 6th Ed. +

The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c58bfe6c3a0eda0b108700>

Long chapter from Ecology of Fear on the end of LA in science fiction +

The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5e7fef829ff37c53982e81fa>

of interest right now ;) +

Trench Warfre: Notes on the 2020 Election 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/602686d79ff37c1c852e81dd>

New Left Review, Second Series 126 (Nov/Dec 2020): pp. 5-32. +

US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality 
<https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5b7369ca9ff37c4897622bd1>

Origins and consequences of Trump +

Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public 
Space <https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5c4e39f19ff37c7d5f622bce>

America’s cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and 
homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and 
hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and 
at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, 
and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a 
paradigm for these places, it’s the theme park.... +

***


  Mike Davis (scholar)

 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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For other people with similar names, see Michael Davis (disambiguation) 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Davis_(disambiguation)>.

*Mike Davis*


<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mike_Davis_(scholar).jpg>

*Born*

	

March 10, 1946

Fontana, California <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontana,_California>, 
U.S.

*Died*

	

October 25, 2022 (aged 76)

San Diego, California 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego,_California>, U.S.

*Alma mater*

	

University of California, Los Angeles 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Los_Angeles>


*School <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_schools_of_philosophy>***

	

  * Critical geography <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_geography>
  * Marxism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism>

*Main interests*

	

  * Urban geography <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_geography>
  * Ecology <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology>
  * Marxism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism>
  * Labor history <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_(discipline)>
  * Political violence <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence>
  * Economic History <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_History>


*Influences*


	
	

*Michael Ryan Davis* (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American 
writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in 
Southern California <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California>. 
He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in 
works such as /City of Quartz 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz>/ and /Late Victorian 
Holocausts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts>/. 
His last non-fiction book is /Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_the_Night_on_Fire:_L.A._in_the_Sixties>/, 
co-authored by Jon Wiener <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Wiener>.


    Contents

·1 Early life and education 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Early_life_and_education>

·2 Career <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Career>

·3 Criticism and academic reception 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Criticism_and_academic_reception>

·4 Personal life and death 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Personal_life_and_death>

·5 Awards and honors 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Awards_and_honors>

·6 Works <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Works>

o6.1 Books <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Books>

§6.1.1 Nonfiction 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Nonfiction>

§6.1.2 Fiction <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Fiction>

o6.2 Articles and essays 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Articles_and_essays>

o6.3 Lectures <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Lectures>

·7 Further reading 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Further_reading>

o7.1 *Profiles* 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Profiles>

o7.2 Reviews <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Reviews>

o7.3 Interviews 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#Interviews>

·8 References 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#References>

·9 External links 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#External_links>


    Early life and education

Davis was born in Fontana, California 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontana,_California>, on March 10, 
1946.^[1] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-LA-1> He 
was raised in the Bostonia 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostonia,_California> neighborhood of El 
Cajon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Cajon,_California> in San Diego 
County <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_County,_California>. His 
education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a 
Congress of Racial Equality 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_Racial_Equality> and Students 
for a Democratic Society 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society_(1960_organization)> 
(SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_College> in the mid-1960s but did 
not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he 
earned BA and MA degrees but did not complete the PhD program in history 
from the University of California, Los Angeles 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Los_Angeles>.^[2] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-2>

Davis stated that one of the moments prompting him to return to study 
after working was a violent strike, “I had this job with a bus-tour 
company when suddenly this insanely violent strike broke out. A 
strikebreaker ran a bus over one of our guys, and next thing I knew I 
was in a room with forty guys voting on whether each of us is gonna put 
up $400 to hire a hit man to kill the head of the strikebreakers. I 
said, ‘Hey, guys, this is just crazy,’ and made the best speech of my 
life. I was outvoted thirty-nine to one. I thought to myself, ‘Typical 
American workers’; I think I said ‘pussies.’ Instead of coming up with a 
political strategy, they reach for their guns as soon as they see a scab 
driving their bus. And here I am about to become a freshman at UCLA, and 
I’m going to get arrested for criminal conspiracy.” ^[3] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-3>


    Career

Davis was a 1996–1997 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Research_Institute>^[4] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-4> and 
received a MacArthur Fellowship Award 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellowship> in 1998.^[5] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-5> He won 
the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lannan_Literary_Award#Lannan_Literary_Award_for_Nonfiction> 
in 2007.

Davis was Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Creative 
Writing at the University of California, Riverside 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Riverside>, and 
an editor of the /New Left Review 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left_Review>/. Davis taught urban 
theory <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_theory> at the Southern 
California Institute of Architecture 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_Institute_of_Architecture> 
and at Stony Brook University 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stony_Brook_University> before he secured 
a position at University of California, Irvine 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Irvine>‘s 
history department. He also contributed to the British monthly 
/Socialist Review <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Review>/, the 
organ of the British Socialist Workers Party 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_(UK)>.^[6] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-Kriza,_odgovori,_levica-6> 
As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written for, among others, /The 
Nation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nation>/, /The New Left Review 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Left_Review>/, /Jacobin 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)>/, and the UK’s /New 
Statesman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Statesman>/.^[7] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-7>[8] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-8>[9] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-9>[10] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-10>

He was a self-defined international socialist and 
“Marxist-Environmentalist”.^[11] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-11> He 
wrote in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates 
such as Lewis Mumford <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford> and 
Garrett Eckbo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Eckbo>, whom he 
cited in /Ecology of Fear/. His early book, /Prisoners of the American 
Dream/, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. 
history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of 
revolutionary integrationism 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_integrationism>, as Davis, 
like Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Shachtman>, Richard S. Fraser 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Fraser>, James Robertson 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robertson_(Trotskyist)>, as well as 
French anarchist Daniel Guérin 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gu%C3%A9rin>, argued that the 
struggle of Black people in the U.S. was for equality, that this 
struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U.S. 
bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that 
its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist 
revolution in the U.S.^[12] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-12>

Davis was also the author of two fiction books for young adults: /Land 
of The Lost Mammoths/ and /Pirates, Bats and Dragons/.


    Criticism and academic reception

Reviewers have praised Davis’ prose style and his exposés of economic, 
social, environmental and political injustice. His book /Planet of 
Slums/ inspired a special issue of /Mute 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mute_(magazine)>/ magazine on global 
slums.^[13] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-13>

According to Todd Purdum’s sharply critical 1999 piece, Davis 
“acknowledged fabricating an entire conversation with a local 
environmentalist, Lewis McAdams, for a cover story he wrote for /L.A. 
Weekly/ a decade ago (in the late 1980s); he defends it as an early 
attempt at journalistic scene-setting.”^[14] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-14> 
However, in his October 2004 /Geography/ article, “That Certain Feeling: 
Mike Davis, Truth and the City,” Kevin Stannard held that this 
“controversy is explained by Davis’s ambiguous balancing of academic 
research and reportage”.^[15] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-15>

Jon Wiener <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Wiener> has defended Davis 
in /The Nation/, maintaining that his critics are political opponents 
exaggerating the significance of small errors.^[16] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-16>

Some academic leftists have also criticized Davis’s focus on modern 
urban structures. In a review essay on /City of Quartz/, geographer 
Cindi Katz <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindi_Katz> criticized its 
apocalypticism as masculinist and tied it to the flattening of people’s 
subjectivity as they are made into “characters” more than social 
actors.^[17] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-17> Citing 
Jane Jacobs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs>‘ attacks upon 
Lewis Mumford in her /Death and Life of Great American Cities,/ Andy 
Merrifield <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Merrifield> 
(/MetroMarxism/, Routledge 2002) wrote that Davis’ analysis was “harsh” 
(p. 170). Davis’ work, particularly /Planet of Slums/, has been 
criticized by Merrifield and urban studies professor Tom Angotti as 
“anti-urban” and “overly apocalyptic”.^[18] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-18>

These critics charge that Davis failed to focus on activist groups among 
the poor and working class in solving problems—as advocated by Manuel 
Castells <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Castells> and Marshall 
Berman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Berman>.^[19] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-19>

As he stated in /Planet of Slums,/ however, Davis was not interested in 
such a “reformist” approach. He argued that most reforms have failed 
because they treat the symptoms rather than the cause: economic and 
political inequality. He argued in /Ecology of Fear/^[20] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-20> that 
realistic solutions lie in a radical transformation of the city and of 
capitalism by the global working-class, as Lewis Mumford and Garrett 
Eckbo advocated.


    Personal life and death

Davis was married to Mexican American artist and professor Alessandra 
Moctezuma (born 1968) and lived in San Diego, California 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego,_California>.^[21] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-21>

He was diagnosed with cancer.^[22] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-22> In a 
July 25, 2022, story in /The Los Angeles Times,/ Davis said, “I’m in the 
terminal stage of metastatic esophageal cancer but still up and around 
the house...But I guess what I think about the most is that I’m just 
extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in 
battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — you 
know, fighting.”^[23] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-23>[24] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-24> He 
died from esophageal cancer 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esophageal_cancer> on October 25, 2022, 
at the age of 76.^[25] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-25>[1] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-LA-1>


    Awards and honors

  * 1996–1997: Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Research_Institute>
  * 1998: MacArthur Fellowship
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellowship>
  * 2002: World History Association Book Prize
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_History_Association_Book_Prize>,
    /Late Victorian Holocausts/
  * 2007: Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lannan_Literary_Award_for_Nonfiction>


    Works


      Books


        Nonfiction

  * /Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the
    History of the U.S. Working Class
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Prisoners_of_the_American_Dream/WqyxAAAAIAAJ>/(1986,
    1999, 2018)
  * /City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz:_Excavating_the_Future_in_Los_Angeles>/(1990,
    2006)
  * /¿Quién mató a Los Ángeles?/(1994, Spanish only)
  * /Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology_of_Fear:_Los_Angeles_and_the_Imagination_of_Disaster>/(1998)
  * /Casino Zombies: True Stories From the Neon West/(1999, German only)
  * /Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Magical_Urbanism/ZCH4UPyi21cC>/(2000)
  * /Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
    Third World
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts:_El_Ni%C3%B1o_Famines_and_the_Making_of_the_Third_World>/(2001)
  * /The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Grit_Beneath_the_Glitter/DwxU8dgsZJkC>/,
    edited with Hal Rothman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Rothman>
    (2002)
  * /Dead Cities, And Other Tales
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dead_Cities_and_Other_Tales/YFSPQAAACAAJ?hl=en>/(2003)
  * /Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Under_the_Perfect_Sun/-YXOHAAACAAJ?hl=en>/,
    with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew (2003)
  * /Cronache Dall’Impero/(2005, Italian only)
  * /The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Monster_at_Our_Door/AIKXPwAACAAJ?hl=en>/(2005)
  * /Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Planet_of_Slums/fBZPEAAAQBAJ?hl=en>/(2006)
  * /No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the
    U.S.-Mexico Border
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/No_One_Is_Illegal/9zD7VMCRCBAC>/,
    with Justin Akers Chacon (2006)
  * /Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Buda_s_Wagon/UhZPEAAAQBAJ>/(2007)
  * /In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_Praise_of_Barbarians/oe9EgFrqvfUC>/(2007)^[26]
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-26>
  * /Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Evil_Paradises/WlSBoDFWbVwC?hl=en&gbpv=0>/,
    edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2007)
  * /Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Be_Realistic/xzREaXOXE4YC>/(2012)
    ^[27] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-27>
  * /Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory
    <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Old_Gods_New_Enigmas/lov-DwAAQBAJ>/(2018)
    ^[28] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)#cite_note-28>
  * /Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_the_Night_on_Fire:_L.A._in_the_Sixties>/,
    co-authored by Jon Wiener <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Wiener>
    (2020)


        Fiction

  * /Islands Mysterious: Where Science Rediscovers Wonder – a Trilogy/,
    illustrated by William Simpson
      o 1. /Land of the Lost Mammoths/ (2003)
      o 2. /Pirates, Bats, and Dragons/ (2004)
      o 3. /Spider Vector/ (forthcoming)


      Articles and essays

  * “The Winged Killer Flies In”
    <http://www.redpepper.org.uk/china/x-dec05-davis.htm>. Red Pepper
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Pepper_(magazine)>. December 2005.
  * “Remembering Bill and Ivan”
    <http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/60/058.html>. Z Magazine. June
    7, 2004.
  * BEARMAN, JOSHUAH (February 2004). “An Interview with Mike Davis”
    <https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-mike-davis/>. The
    Believer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Believer_(magazine)> (10).
  * Review of the essay /The Cultural Logic of Late Capital/ by Frederic
    Jameson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Jameson>.

  * Articles by Mike Davis at /The Rag Blog/
    <http://www.theragblog.com/tag/mike-davis/>


      Lectures

  * Audio of Mike Davis’s lecture “Who Will Build the Ark: The
    Architectural Imagination in an Age of Catastrophic Convergence”
    <http://depts.washington.edu/schkatz/podcasts/katz0809_davis.mp3>
    delivered at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Chapin_Simpson_Center_for_the_Humanities>
    on November 6, 2008.


    Further reading


      Profiles

  * “The American Earthquake – Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster
    <http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9709/shatz.html> By Adam
    Shatz, in Lingua Franca
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Franca_(magazine)>, (September
    1997)
  * MacAdams, Lewis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_MacAdams>.
    (November 26, 1998) “Jeremiah Among the Palms: The lives and dark
    prophecies of Mike Davis
    <https://www.laweekly.com/jeremiah-among-the-palms/>.” LA Weekly
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LA_Weekly>
  * Davis interviewed by Bill Moyers
    <https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03202009/profile.html> Video,
    transcript and recent articles. March 20, 2009
  * “L.A. Story: Backlash of the Boosters”
    <http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990222/wiener> by Jon Wiener
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Wiener> /Nation/ (February 4, 1999).
  * “Best-Selling Author’s Gloomy Future for Los Angeles Meets
    Resistance”
    <https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E3DB1339F934A15752C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all>
    Todd S. Purdum, /The New York Times
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times>/


      Reviews

  * “Seven Oaks” Planet of Slums review, by Derrick O’Keefe
    <https://web.archive.org/web/20061030214123/http:/www.sevenoaksmag.com/commentary/planetofslums.html>
  * Planet of Slums reviews in Mute Magazine
    <https://web.archive.org/web/20111220003336/http:/www.metamute.org/Naked-Cities-Struggle-in-the-Global-Slums>
  * Planet of Slums Review from (Johannesburg) Sunday Independent
    <http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,11,2578>
  * “Slums, resistance and the African working class”
    <http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=398&issue=117> A friendly
    critique of Planet of Slums by Leo Zeilig and Claire Ceruti in
    International Socialism
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Socialism_(magazine)>
  * Review of “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making
    of the Third World”
    <https://web.archive.org/web/20081201230222/http:/www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/14.4/br_11.html>


      Interviews

  * Interview with Orhan Ayyüce
    <http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=92790_0_23_0_M> of
    Archinect, October 12, 2009.
  * Interview with Juris Jurjevics
    <http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2006/apr/06/planet-slums/> of
    San Diego Reader <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Reader>,
    April 6, 2006.
  * Interview with the editors of Voices of Resistance from Occupied
    London
    <https://web.archive.org/web/20071221015456/http:/www.occupiedlondon.org/davis>,
    an anarchist journal from the United Kingdom, February 23, 2007.
  * Interview with IRIN News
    <http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=63&ReportId=74019>,
    the news service of the UN Office for the Coordination of
    Humanitarian Affairs, September 2007.
  * Interview on Bill Moyers Journal
    <https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03202009/profile.html>, March
    20, 2009.
  * Podcast
    <http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2008/10/interview-with-mike-davis-contributor.html>
    of Mike Davis discussing his article “Can Obama See the Grand
    Canyon?”, October 15, 2008.
  * BOMB Magazine Interview with Mike Davis
    <http://bombsite.com/issues/104/articles/3146> by Lucy Raven. Summer
    2008
  * Mike Davis on Rag Radio
    <https://archive.org/details/RagRadio2011-10-14-MikeDavis>
    Interviewed by Thorne Dreyer
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne_Dreyer>, October 14, 2011 (56:53)
  * Mike Davis on the Crimes of Socialism and Capitalism
    <https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/mike-davis-late-victorian-holocausts-famine-mao-stalin>.
    /Jacobin <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)>./
    October 23, 2018.
  * Mike Davis: As Workers Face Dangerous Conditions Amid Reopening, We
    Need Unions & Medicare for All
    <https://www.democracynow.org/2020/5/22/mike_davis_as_workers_face_dangerous>
    /Democracy Now! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Now!>/ May
    22, 2020.
  * Discussion with Susan Straight January 2008
    <https://web.archive.org/web/20110116225219/http:/www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/mike-davis/>


    References

Notes

 Miranda, Carolina A. (October 25, 2022). “Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ 
author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies” 
<https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-10-25/mike-davis-writer-who-chronicled-the-forces-that-shaped-l-a-dies>. 
The Los Angeles Times/. Retrieved //October 26,//2022/.

  Larson, Thomas (October 17, 2003). “Under Our Perfect Sun: Profile 
of Mike Davis” 
<https://www.thomaslarson.com/publications/san-diego-reader/95-under-our-perfect-sun.html>. 
San Diego Reader/. Retrieved //August 20,//2022/.

 Adam Shatz. The American Earthquake. 
<http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9709/davis.html> Retrieved March 
23, 2015.

 Getty Research Institute. Scholar Year 1996/1997. 
<http://getty.edu/research/scholarly_activities/annual_themes/1996-1997.html> 
Retrieved September 3, 2008.

 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. MacArthur Fellows July 
1998. 
<http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.1142723/k.28C4/Fellows_List__July_1998.htm> 
Archived 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20110927040527/http:/www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.1142723/k.28C4/Fellows_List__July_1998.htm> 
September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine> Retrieved September 3, 
2008.

 Jadžić, Miloš & Miljković, Dušan & Veselinović, Ana (eds.). (2012). 
/Kriza, odgovori, levica: Prilozi za jedan kritički diskurs/, Rosa 
Luxemburg Stiftung 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg_Stiftung> Southeastern 
Europe: Belgrade <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgrade>, p. 316 (in 
Serbian <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_language>)

 “MIKE DAVIS” <https://www.thenation.com/authors/mike-davis/>. The 
Nation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nation>/. Retrieved //October 
25,//2022/.

 “MIKE DAVIS” 
<https://newleftreview.org/search?query%5Bq%5D=&query%5Bauthor%5D=168&query%5Bstart_year%5D=&query%5Bend_year%5D=&query%5Btitle%5D=&query%5Bbody%5D=&query%5Bsubject%5D=&query%5Btype%5D=&commit=Search>. 
The New Left Review <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Left_Review>.

 “Mike Davis” <https://www.newstatesman.com/author/mikedavis>. New 
Statesman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Statesman>/. Retrieved 
//October 25,//2022/.

 “Mike Davis” <https://jacobin.com/author/mike-davis>. Jacobin 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin>/. Retrieved //October 25,//2022/.

  Cottrell, Christopher (2003). “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino 
Famines and the Making of the Third World”. [Review]. Journal of World 
History. *14* (4): 577–579. doi 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_(identifier)>:10.1353/jwh.2003.0050 
<https://doi.org/10.1353%2Fjwh.2003.0050>.

 “theLAnd Interview: Mike Davis” 
<https://thelandmag.com/the-land-interview-mike-davis-jeff-weiss/>. 
TheLAnd/. Retrieved //October 25,//2022/.

 “Mute Vol 2 #3 - Naked Cities – Struggle in the Global Slums” 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20111220003336/http:/www.metamute.org/Naked-Cities-Struggle-in-the-Global-Slums>. 
Mute. August 2006. Archived from the original 
<http://www.metamute.org/Naked-Cities-Struggle-in-the-Global-Slums> on 
December 20, 2011/. Retrieved //May 29,//2008/.

  Purdum, Todd S. (January 27, 1999). “Best-Selling Author’s Gloomy 
Future for Los Angeles Meets Resistance” 
<https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E3DB1339F934A15752C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all>. 
The New York Times <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times>/. 
Retrieved //May 29,//2008/.

  Stannard, Kevin (2004). “That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and 
the City”. Geography. *89* (3): 254–268. doi 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_(identifier)>:10.1080/00167487.2004.12094103 
<https://doi.org/10.1080%2F00167487.2004.12094103>. JSTOR 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR_(identifier)> 40573997 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/40573997>.

  Wiener, Jon (February 22, 1999). “LA Story: Backlash of the 
Boosters” 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20121021135546/https:/www.thenation.com/article/la-story-backlash-boosters/>. 
The Nation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nation>. Archived from the 
original <https://www.thenation.com/article/la-story-backlash-boosters/> 
on October 21, 2012/. Retrieved //June 4,//2019/.

  Katz, Cindi (1993). “Reflections While Reading City of Quartz by 
Mike Davis”. Antipode. *25* (2): 159–163. doi 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_(identifier)>:10.1111/j.1467-8330.1993.tb00515.x 
<https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-8330.1993.tb00515.x>.

 Review of Mike Davis’ /Planet of Slums/ 
<http://housingstruggles.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/mike-davis-planet-of-slums/> 
Archived 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20111005113508/http:/housingstruggles.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/mike-davis-planet-of-slums/> 
October 5, 2011, at the Wayback Machine 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine>, The Struggle for the 
City, June 2008

 Merrifield, /MetroMarxism/, and Angotti, Tom (2006). “Apocalyptic 
anti-urbanism: Mike Davis and his planet of slums”. International 
Journal of Urban and Regional Research. *30* (4): 961–967. doi 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_(identifier)>:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00705.x 
<https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1468-2427.2006.00705.x>.

 Davis, Mike. 2000. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination 
of Disaster. New York: Vintage.

  Marx, Jesse (July 7, 2022). “Recognizing Mike Davis, San Diego’s 
Giant of Urban Theory” 
<https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/07/07/recognizing-mike-davis-san-diegos-giant-of-urban-theory/>. 
Voice of San Diego/. Retrieved //October 26,//2022/.

 “Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe” 
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/california-chronicles/mike-davis-in-the-age-of-catastrophe>. 
The New Yorker <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker>. April 24, 
2020.

  Dean, Sam (July 25, 2022). “Mike Davis is still a damn good 
storyteller” 
<https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-07-25/mike-davis-reflects-on-life-activism-climate-change-bernie-sanders-aoc-los-angeles-politics>. 
Los Angeles Times <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times>.

  Arellano, Gustavo (July 28, 2022). “Column: Mike Davis has terminal 
cancer. But his big worry is what is happening to our world” 
<https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2022-07-28/mike-davis-conversation-doom-hope>. 
San Diego Union-Tribune 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Union-Tribune>/. Retrieved 
//August 20,//2022/.

  Wiener, Jon (October 25, 2022). “Mike Davis: 1946–2022” 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-obituary/>. The 
Nation/. Retrieved //October 26,//2022/.

  de Leon, Cedric (2008). “Review of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays 
against Empire”. Contemporary Sociology 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Sociology>. *37* (4): 
370–372. doi 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_(identifier)>:10.1177/009430610803700446 
<https://doi.org/10.1177%2F009430610803700446>. ISSN 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSN_(identifier)> 0094-3061 
<https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0094-3061>. JSTOR 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR_(identifier)> 20444240 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/20444240>. S2CID 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2CID_(identifier)> 143619608 
<https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:143619608>.

  Davis, Mike. Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible 
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/455-be-realistic>. Haymarket 
Books. ISBN <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)> 
9781608462179 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781608462179>/. 
Retrieved //July 15,//2022/.

 Davis, Mike (October 6, 2020). Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost 
Theory <https://www.versobooks.com/books/2779-old-gods-new-enigmas>. 
Verso. ISBN <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)> 
9781788732178 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781788732178>/. 
Retrieved //August 24,//2018/.
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