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Mike Davis

Born

in Fontana, California, The United States

March 10, 1946

Died

October 25, 2022

Genre

Social Sciences, History, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Influences

Lewis Mumford, Garrett Eckbo, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky ...more

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Mike Davis was a titan of radical scholarship, a "Marxist-Environmentalist" whose work redefined urban theory and California history. Born in Fontana and raised in the working-class community of Bostonia, Davis was shaped by the rugged landscape of San Diego’s East County and the visceral realities of class struggle. His "burning bush" moment occurred in 1962 during a CORE demonstration, propelling him into a life of activism. He became a key organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), coordinating anti-Apartheid sit-ins and draft resistance while befriending lifelong mentors like Levi Kingston.
Before entering academia, Davis lived a quintessentially proletarian life as a meat cutter and long-haul truck driver. This "on-the-groun ...more

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Mike Davis’s books

Average rating: 4.08 · 19,708 ratings · 2,326 reviews · 229 distinct works • Similar authors

	City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles 4.21 avg rating — 5,036 ratings — published 1990 — 44 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Planet of Slums 4.01 avg rating — 3,451 ratings — published 2006	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World 4.21 avg rating — 2,206 ratings — published 2000 — 16 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster 4.07 avg rating — 1,529 ratings — published 1992 — 28 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb 3.89 avg rating — 636 ratings — published 2007 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by Mike Davis, Jon Wiener (Goodreads Author) 4.36 avg rating — 526 ratings — published 2020 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class 4.42 avg rating — 492 ratings — published 1986 — 12 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City by Mike Davis, Román de la Campa (Foreword by) 3.74 avg rating — 442 ratings — published 2000 — 12 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Dead Cities 4.06 avg rating — 340 ratings — published 2002 — 16 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory 3.98 avg rating — 331 ratings — published 2018 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Mike Davis (?)

“The car bomb is the poor man’s air force.”
― Mike Davis

tags: freedom-fighter, guerilla, resistance, tactics, terrorism

27 likes

“If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947.”
― Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

tags: british, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, india, liberalism, victorian

21 likes

“Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region’s high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

7 likes

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Mike Davis’s Followers (703)

Mike Davis

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Combine Editions
Mike Davis’s books