Book Description
From the author of City of Quartz, a startling new view
of Los Angeles, the disaster capital of the world--and
what it has to tell us about America at the millennium. Los
Angeles has become a magnet for the American apocalyptic
imagination. Riot, fire, flood, earthquake . . . only
locusts are missing from the almost biblical list of
disasters that has struck the city in the l990s. And the
force of real catastrophe has been redoubled by the
obsessive fictional destruction of Los Angeles--by
aliens, comets, and twisters--in scores of novels and
films. The former "Land of Sunshine" is now
seen by much of the world, including many of L.A.'s
increasingly nervous residents, as a veritable Book of
the Apocalypse theme park.
In this extraordinary book, Mike Davis unravels the
secret political history of disaster, real and imaginary,
in southern California. As he surveys the earthquakes of
Santa Monica, the burning of Koreatown, and the invasion
of "man-eating" mountain lions, he exposes the
deep complicity between social injustice and perceptions
of natural disorder. Los Angeles, Davis argues, has
deliberately put itself in harm's way. And he shows that
the floods, fires, and earthquakes that the city has
reaped were tragedies as avoidable--and unnatural--as the
beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the
streets.
Rich with detail, bold and original, Ecology of Fear
is a gripping reconnaissance into the urban future from
our most provocative interpreter of the American
metropolis.
