Dead Cities

In reviewing Dead Cities, novelist J.G. Ballard declared that "if America is over, the prose laureate of its decline is Mike Davis." Now this extraordinary assembly of essays on cities and ecological destruction--"a vivid indictment of the social and environmental chaos enveloping urban America", as Ballard put it, is back in print.

In accounts that range from New York City, Las Vegas, eerie wastelands created by the Pentagon in Nevada and Utah, to Montreal and Auckland-and always returning to his primary canvas of Los Angeles-Davis paints unforgettable Boschian portraits of urban neglect, political scandal, city-level ethnic cleansing, and infinite greed. Explaining why our cities are as little prepared to deal with climate change as terror attacks and corporate irradiation of neighborhoods, Davis sounded a prophetic call to understand the radical contingency of the metropolis.